The Gaming Den

So. As mentioned in PL's rant thread, 3D printers are chugging along at a respectable rate in design. As far as traditional games--card games, board games, TTRPGs, wargames--go, the appeal of this is that it reduces the barrier to entry to have a miniatures line because you don't have to have great sculptors in order to get your warmage going or your board game better. You just need good 3D artists, which is a more common skill. And people do like to Collect 'Em All.

Even though the technology is not there yet and probably won't be for another decade, it is worth speculating how this invention will affect these games I think.

I'm not sure how valuable full tactility is ... once we get glasses free multi-user 3D displays for the table top would these 3D printers serve a purpose for our particular niche?

Definitely something to consider. For example:

In terms of card games and board games, there is already a number of printable games out there. They don't seem to have taken off a great deal. I suspect that this has something to do with the quality of cards that you can print yourself. You pretty much need a laminator just to get cards and tokens which can be reused.

Much the same can be said for TTRPGs.

For wargames, there's something to be made, I think. Especially if you could print multiple colors, then you could whip out a ready made army over the weekend.
Once clones of GW models are available, I think that we'll see GW getting into some trouble. Somewhat ironically, CGL might be in a position to take advantage of this, having a really crap mini line as is, their profits seem mainly to come from book sales which should remain somewhat unaffected (this has issues with pdf distribution, but that's another topic).

I think 3D displays wont impact wargames as much as TTRPGs, but I'm happy to be proven wrong

I don't think it'll affect anything. 3D printing is only cost effective if you're not able to employ the economies of scale for casting, and in-home common use 3D printers are obvious and unlikely future-tech.

There's a tiny chance that we'll have game shops sitting on 3D printers for on-demand mini making like there are those on-demand book printing and binding machines making their way into bookstores, but this won't really change anything: minis won't have to be stocked, but they'll still have to be purchased.

Even if the production cost is incredibly cheap, you need people who are willing to buy armies of minis, not just the minis they like, and then pack them all up and fight them against other people's armies. Considering the collectors can buy the few minis they like as well as Transformers and 6" tall pewter wizards, and the wargamers can also play computer wargames, you're looking at a pretty small overlap on the Venn diagram.

Yeah, current personal ones are like 1-2 grand + operating expenses.

What does a Warhammer 40K army run?

There are already some incredible 3D printing technologies out there, at least if wikipedia is to be believed. Considering the the cheap "Printer that can print a copy of itself (printing copy of self not yet fully implemented)" is like seriously one or two thousand bucks and apparently the 3D printer industry is in a race to reduce prices and has been for like 5 years now (according to numerous web articles), that means that 3d Printers are ALREADY good enough and probably already, or soon to be cheap enough.

In a universe where they weren't INSANE what a Games Workshop store probably ALREADY should look like would be like this...

The only models on the shelfs are demo armies and painted finished display or resale material.

All other models are printed on demand, volumes just aren't that high in the industry, even the biggest movers at an individual store don't go THAT fast. And pricing is ALREADY really high so you know you are making a profit even when printing on demand.

Meanwhile the store ALWAYS has "stock" for EVERYTHING in the entire model range. So you get all the weird obscure model/unit option sales you would miss out on or struggle to fill in the current market.

Games like Epic and Warmaster and all that crap can be catered to in ALL regions and you don't have to worry about continents like Australia just not getting stocks of the "specialist" games, and you don't have to "discontinue" games because of low print runs, because your print run is always "One" in size and you don't even start it until someone pays you the money for the final product.

In addition your print on demand service allows the user to view the models on a computer before printing and lets them pose them using simple skeletal posing and swap out optional extras like guns and hats and other gimmicks. Hell, you could seriously let the user customize the facial expressions. Hell they could put their OWN face on the model. No really, "we have the technology".

The actual cost to put a new model into your range is tiny in comparison to now. You only need someone to draw up the 3D model, you can easily create some model like a "Wrecked version of unpopular hover tank X" and sell it to some suckers and it totally cost you nothing more than a couple hours of 3d Modeler time hacking up the existing hover tank model. It doesn't matter if you only sell it in small numbers because you didn't have to do large production run and ship them out to all the stores in order to add it to your product line, you just stuck the file on the model server all your stores have access to.

Finally apparently you can even print 3d models IN COLOR, apparently. And even if that is crude (and considering the incredibly fine 3D resolution possible there is no reason to believe that) it would STILL be an improvement over colorless plastic models until you got around to painting them.

Throw in some good 2d Printing gear and you can print up EVERYTHING for a game ON SITE. Even the god damn box. Which for at least some products (like new releases and specialist limited run items) you totally would. Of course you actually screw your customers by NOT providing boxes with most of their hot off the press custom items unless they pay for the box print as well. Hell you can even sell a deluxe 3d custom printed box designed specifically to hold that custom model.

Now, individual cost to produce your models might go up, (again, pricing is probably already easily high enough to account for this) but the business plan goes like this.

1) You never ever miss out on a sale because of lack of stock.
2) You hardly ever print anything you don't sell, so there is never unsold stock.
3) Costs to add to your product range are minimal, roll out to stores is near instantaneous and "dud releases" will cost you very little.
4) "Modding" models becomes a service the users pay you for.
5) Nothing you ever print goes "out of print" and you can keep making money from the two or three sales of stupid ass blood bowl games in any given store each year, FOREVER.
6) You need to adopt this business model before a rival does, or before the pricing of 3d scanning and printing goes low enough that your customers start pirating your existing models and actually improving on your product by editing and re sculpting them in the process.

As a final note I haven't followed virtual reality and 3d imaging technology for a rather long time now, but last I saw of it we totally aren't getting 3d non-glasses table top images any time soon. Hell last I saw "Virtual Reality" tech was stagnating more than AI tech.

As far as I see it the only thing here preventing some sucker from doing this is to do some simple cost/profit math determining if you can make a good profit using existing mini prices and the cost of the gunk you load into these machines. Bake time, the potential 10-30,000 dollar cost for a seriously hard core couple of 3d Printers per shop, that sort of stuff is basically standard overhead chump change if the gunk vs mini cost works out.

PhoneLobster wrote:... that means that 3d Printers are ALREADY good enough and probably already, or soon to be cheap enough.

At the moment, the printers that are good enough are nowhere near $1-2K
Here's to hoping, though.

In a universe where they weren't INSANE what a Games Workshop store probably ALREADY should look like would be like this...

The only models on the shelfs are demo armies and painted finished display or resale material.

...

At the moment that is quite viable for rulebooks using 'print on demand', however GW only distributes PDFs for its specialist games range.
Given GW is unwilling to change to make digital rulebooks available (To prevent piracy? A quick search shows that this isn't working) I find it very hard to believe that they would ever shift to printing out models. Stranger things have happened, though.

In addition your print on demand service allows the user to view the models on a computer before printing and lets them pose them using simple skeletal posing and swap out optional extras like guns and hats and other gimmicks. Hell, you could seriously let the user customize the facial expressions. No really, "we have the technology".

I like this and I think that the start of 3D printing for miniatures will be printing out shoulderpads and other extras for customisation.

Finally apparently you can even print 3d models IN COLOR, apparently. And even if that is crude (and considering the incredibly fine 3D resolution possible there is no reason to believe that) it would STILL be an improvement over colorless plastic models until you got around to painting them.

I haven't seen any printers capable of mixing colors (which I think is required for most pre-painted applications) and the cheap printers print in the color of the plastic you put in.

6) You need to adopt this business model before a rival does, or before the pricing of 3d scanning and printing goes low enough that your customers start pirating your existing models and actually improving on your product by editing and re sculpting them in the process.

This.
And I don't see any company doing it. All of the large ones seem very slow to change.
Maybe the historicals will go first - it's hard to copywrite the image of a Panzer IV.

PhoneLobster wrote:As a final note I haven't followed virtual reality and 3d imaging technology for a rather long time now, but last I saw of it we totally aren't getting 3d non-glasses table top images any time soon. Hell last I saw "Virtual Reality" tech was stagnating more than AI tech.

The technology is there, just not at a price where it makes sense to do a production run.

For instance this display can be build with present technologies (a lenticular lens will do fine for the directional diffuser, and DLP has enough bandwidth for the huge amount of FPS the projector has to operate at). One or two man years of engineering time and 10K of materials, not counting the metal shop work, a grad student could pull it off for a thesis.

The main problem at the moment is bandwidth ... LCDs are just too slow, they barely have enough FPS for 2 views let alone the dozen you would need for 6 individual stereoscopic views. While DLP is fast enough, you can't make compact displays that way.

Getting the generated images to individual eyes is less of a problem ... not a completely solved problem, but one for which all the basic building blocks are already there.

PhoneLobster wrote: 6) You need to adopt this business model before a rival does, or before the pricing of 3d scanning and printing goes low enough that your customers start pirating your existing models and actually improving on your product by editing and re sculpting them in the process.

I look forward to the day people can pirate GW minis.

Koumei wrote:I look forward to the day people can pirate GW minis.

Actually that day is already here and as someone with as much contact with the GW community as you seem to have I can pretty much guarantee you that you have played with pirates and probably against pirated models.

It's just the technology currently used to pirate GW models is not digital technology.

They do it with modern mold and casting technologies. Which are these days pretty cheap and easy and can make remarkably high quality copies with minimal loss of detail.

The thing is those technologies require special tools and chemicals and a certain degree of knowledge and practice.

Most of the... kind of people who play GW... don't even KNOW those tools and that knowledge exists.

The thing is as 3d printers and scanners become cheaper we increasingly have situations where some GW kiddy's dad will be an engineer or something and will totally have the kit at home to just chuck minis in and with a couple of casual clicks be able to make more.

I mean I wouldn't be surprised if this is already happening in incredibly limited numbers and isolated cases, the big deal comes when major GW communities start figuring this out and their members realize that prices are finally low enough for it to be worth purchasing some form of 3D printer/scanner set up exclusively to copy and modify models.

A quick browse of articles on 3d printing and ads for 3d printers suggests we are pretty much at that dangerous tipping point now.

Of course you could stay there for years, why I could tell you stories about water proof full color custom printed plant tags that wouldn't make the GW 3d printer revolution sound promising or likely at all...

There are various web sites that allow you to use a 3D printer to make your own stuff. Here's a guy who has created some D&D miniatures that way:
http://www.shapeways.com/shops/reno?sg21803[rows]=10

Is there a $2k printer that can print, say, 20cm WoW characters?
My dad used to have a print shop before the mafia raided him and he quit. I want to set up a 3d print shop at the local version of Gamestop, sell enough minis to compensate for the cost of the printer, get raided by the mafia and make my dad proud.

That's right, resin moulds. I forgot about that method. And some people print tank schematics out and then cut them out on plasticard, making very cheap tanks (with none of the money going to GW as a bonus) But yeah, the kind of pirating I was thinking of was "Oh, they're releasing the new minis for Codex: DSFARGEG next month!" "Lol, I already downloaded the minis and printed an army out."

At the old store, I delighted in the storeguy saying "I have a preview copy of the new book, want to see?" and being able to say "I already have all the info on a 4chan leak" (or even the codex itself downloaded, in the case of new Nids).

Starmaker, if you want to do something like this you will need to find the prices and do your math on expenses and profits yourself.

Anything less is just asking for trouble.

Koumei wrote:"Lol, I already downloaded the minis and printed an army out."

Another advantage of digital modeling and releases would be you could to some degree actually beat the rumor mill.

Only the most minimal of security would be required when you can actually have your 3D artist design your new model AND get the design out to your shops AND have the shops start printing and selling the model in a single god damn working day!

The Internet would hardly have time to post blurry pictures of the model and it would ALREADY be in all the stores and in half the forum poster's collections.

I mean ultimately some bastards will find SOME security leak and just get your 3d files, or scan the models and make them some new skeletons, and then anyone could print them, but that will happen ANYWAY, your security is only the minimal amount required so that your shops get the files first (which is about the same amount you would need anyway to stop script kiddies trashing your server) .

The plan to survive the inevitable pirating is that the main thing your stores are selling is really the community and the venue as much as anything else, you should have more than enough customers happy to support you even with the knowledge that with only minor inconvenience they can pirate your junk at home.

Contrary to the wailing cries of the movie and computer game industries rampant pirating really isn't hurting them at all. If anything it only makes them stronger. So your "anti-piracy plan" is ultimately that every gamer with a pirated army will grow your community and increase the numbers of NON-pirate gamers within it.

A good friend of mine who is a programmer( and sometime game developer) also happens to be a huge fiend for Eurogames. He was speculating this weekend about getting a 3d printer for the lulz. I think he might do it, and we were talking about doing customizable games, that sort of thing.

Blasted wrote:In terms of card games and board games, there is already a number of printable games out there. They don't seem to have taken off a great deal. I suspect that this has something to do with the quality of cards that you can print yourself. You pretty much need a laminator just to get cards and tokens which can be reused.

Much the same can be said for TTRPGs.

Indeed. The plastic needed to get professional quality miniatures isn't free. The time and skill needed to set up the 3D model isn't free. And making smaller print runs doesn't make it any cheaper.

My guess is that having print-on-demand miniatures will have the same effect as print-on-demand books -- it'll make it easier for hobbyists to create somewhat more professional-looking homebrew materials, but it won't be competing with the big boys (maybe in either price or quality, but not both) any time soon.

Starmaker wrote:Is there a $2k printer that can print, say, 20cm WoW characters?
My dad used to have a print shop before the mafia raided him and he quit. I want to set up a 3d print shop at the local version of Gamestop, sell enough minis to compensate for the cost of the printer, get raided by the mafia and make my dad proud.

Raided by the mafia? Do I even want to know?

I don't think that some Young Turk is going to roll by and demolish GW or anything with this technology, but do you wonder if WotC/WW/CGL/friggin' Konami might pounce on it and try to get some of the wargame pie?

All of those companies have actively resisted selling PDFs, at some point. To push into a new area (with the exception of CGL) where even the models are simply IP would be a bridge too far. CGL could - as they currently make no money from miniatures, I understand. It might come down to licensing issues with IWM though.

Lago PARANOIA wrote:I don't think that some Young Turk is going to roll by and demolish GW or anything with this technology, but do you wonder if WotC/WW/CGL/friggin' Konami might pounce on it and try to get some of the wargame pie?

No. For example, WotC already sells miniatures and they produce them in "large" batches using the "normal" process. How is a 3D printer supposed to help them again?

If your business model is randomized miniatures a 3D printer does very little for you.

But that is also a really shitty and risky business model.

Also you can argue that there is a certain "gambling" market out there that you can appeal to with that business model, but it also alienates a potentially large market of more sensible collectors.

Case in point the apparent success of the Fantasy Flight LCG card game format, a format that has, if FF can be believed, turned their tanking CCG products into stable ongoing franchises.

That's the sort of thing that giving actual choice, convenience and control to your consumer gets you. A stable loyal customer base.

It's not something an existing company is going to do, because they're all cockags who hate their customers and are resistant to change.

Basically, it would be a good way for a plucky new rival to get a footing: the first one to try doing that could get enough support to actually be "The other guy" in the industry. You'd have GW there as usual, probably PP as well, and then "The other guy" sitting comfortably up there with them (but a bit below).