New plastic mechs!

http://battletech.catalystgamelabs.com/2009/10/23/catalyst-game-labs-offers-premium-quality-plastic-miniatures/

Catalyst is going to start making plastic mechs! They seem a bit pricey at $8.00 a piece (17.95 for 2 figures) But it certainly beats the price of metal figures and I prefer plastic anyway.

I love this trend, DEATH TO FUCKING METAL!!!!

But $18.00! That's GW pricing. I can get two plastic models out of a gumbal machince for .50 cents.
Acutally I can get a box of plastic mech for the cost of four and get a map, and rules, and fluff.

Gee, can we ever escape these assholes. I dunno, glad I have other "interest".

JerryB

Well I found the reasoning for it. These are not made by Ironwind metals. The quality is just as good if not better. So basically they had to jack the prices up a bit so that they don't just eradicate all of Ironwind's sales. I'm certain they are not to upset about all they extra profit either though

if they are plastic i can make cosrum mechs so easier

Everybody needs to turn their greed meters down if they want to survie.

JerryB

It's impossible when it costs several thousand dollars per mold. Good quality plastics just aren't cheap, it's nothing about greed. Our company had to get a nice plastic mold made for one of our items, simple round base for our lamp lines, the stupid thing cost us 3,000 dollars. For game companies to make the mold for each figure at those kind of prices just kills them. Alkemy is a really cool game that tried to go plastic only for indivdual figs, ended up with a single fig of 28mm costing $20. For a niche product that sells in such low volumes, plastics are not the best option, hence why many companies are trying to move to resin which is cheap.... but problem with resin is that it's a major pain to work with and not suited for mass production.

They already announced also that the plastic figs in the new 25th Anniversary box coming will be similar to the ones in the first plastic box and not these expensive figs.

They are also not afraid of hurting IWM, as IWM is seeing huge boosts in sales since the introduction of the Btech box sets. Catalyst only plans on doing some mechs in plastic so the idea is that they are gonna drag more people into the game like the intro box sets did, while also boosting IWM sales due to people needing to get more figs for their armies. IWM apparently themselves said they are happy with the news as it just likely means more growth for Btech which just benefits them and their biggest selling line. They got over 500 figs, a handful of plastics is not gonna kill them off.

Interesting stuff.

The other problem with plastic production is that the size of the mold is not a huge factor in the cost, so you see very little cost difference between a large mech model and a single little dude. The process of making the mold is the major cost. For multi sprue models the cost really jumps since your paying that mold cost for each sprue made basically. Think how much it costs to make one of those big multi sprue vehicle kits! Something like a baneblade is going to cost probably much more than $15,000 just for the sprues, only a company like GW deals in the volume to make this cost effective, and now PP is gotten big enough that making it's jacks in plastic is cost effective enough (at least it should). We had to make alterations to many our initial lamp designs because they would require tiny little plastic parts made that would have required another several thousand dollar investment for tiny plastic parts, so we had to go with other materials or redesigns to make it more cost effective.

The only problem with metal is that is sucks.

jerryb wrote:The only problem with metal is that is sucks.

QFT

jerryb wrote:The only problem with metal is that is sucks.

Ideal world everything would be plastic, but game companies being mostly small just can't handle it. Course the cost of pewter has shot through the roof and even that has become too expensive for many. Reaper has even had to turn back to using more lead in their minis for their larger figs.

Resin looks like it will be the popular choice for many games to go to as plastic is just to expensive to work with. Not a fan of resin figs, but it's cheaper than pewter and plastics, but many companies don't want to deal with the time and hassle of doing large amounts of resin.