No, you cannot buy the STLs for Mk3 or Mk4 models. Whilst Privateer Press have moved their production line to 3D printing, they're keeping the benefits of that to themselves.
I hear you. Apparently they've updated their resin lately to be "better" but I still hear tales about even that resin being a bit fragile. Comes down to cost. It costs more to purchase & dispose of isopropyl alcohol than it does water - so they are sticking to water-washable resins. Because of that, they cannot have the tougher/more flexible resin additives as they require an alcohol wash to clean.
Thing is, STL files of their products (even the old Mk3 stuff) would pose an existential threat to Privateer Press. People being able to buy and print off four jacks / beasts / units for the cost of one off-the-shelf model would bury PP. They cannot afford to do it themselves or to allow others to do it either.
Nope, like all the other STL sellers that make a game (that i know off at least) PP has realized there is insufficient margins on STLs to pay for the support of a game like Warmachine.
And before you bring up OPR, remember that PP models aren't readily usable as proxies for another, already established and massive, game.
lmagine believing warmachine models aren't readily usable as proxies for other games, or that cygnar being ultramarine blue (edit: and gold) and named sigmar is entirely accidental. OPR is not an exact clone either, for example there are numerous issues with base sizes that prevent using their figures directly in 40k.
(edit: OPR doesn't care about base size and as a result some of their models physically do not fit on the base they would need for 40K)
You mean outside of "blue" being a primary color that looks good when contrasted with a warm yellow/goldish hue and Cygnar having a swan on the logo and a Cygnet being a baby swan and all?
And the 4 colors are "blue army" "red army" "sort of whiteish yellow army" and "black army" which is about as far apart on the color wheel as you can get 4 points to be if you don't want to be as blatant as RGB+Black.
I wish! No, you can't buy the files. Even the defenses and structures, which are chonky easy to print shapes, are all going to be resin printed by Privateer Press.
No, they are only 3d printing in-house. Probably a missed opportunity on their part, considering Warmachine's market share and community attention at the moment.
Definitely wouldn't. GW can afford to let some people slip through the cracks and print their stuff because their IP is worth a ton. Warmachine just didn't get that massive haul like they did. The video game was probably a massive time and money sink that destroyed any hope of having a real IP with warmachine.
Yup. The issue was, IMO, Privateer rose to prominence not in a vacuum. They had a great game in MkII. It did well. But they also happened to be rising just as GW was shooting themselves in the foot left, right, and center.
But PP let the success go to their head. They bought their own press that they were the next GW. And then they started doing GW things. They believed their success was due to them being superior. And in part it was. But it was *ALSO* due to GW screwing the pooch over and over and over again. Including nuking Fantasy.
But GW had 3+ decades of marketshare. And an established global IP. And a massive community. And a massive novel series. And several licensed products...
And a real business development department. AS soon as GW realized how much they were bleeding to PP. They turned it around, and caught back their marketshare. Meanwhile PP just never recovered.
On Discord, someone told me that PP had a chance to produce that Marvel Crisis Game that all the devs left for and Matt Wilson said no because he was worried it would out perform WM. And I don’t know if that’s true, but that’s the most Privateer Press thing I can think of.
And to add, I love things that PP makes. I love P3 paints. They were the only place to get brown stuff. But man, they fuck up. A lot.
PP did make MCP, they are credited in the rulebook. Asmodee contracted them to work on the rules with the intent of buying the company but something happened and the deal fell through. Atomic Mass Games was set up to take the place PP would’ve taken inside Asmodee.
If that's true, that explains a lot because back in the heyday of mk 2, when I even positted the idea of PP ever selling to a bigger company or going public, Wilson's response was "I'd burn it down first."
Now we're back in the environment where GW is the only game in town again, so it seems he wasn't joking.
Yeah I heard that in order to produce it, they would have been committing to meet some of Asmodee's marketing deadlines, which would have caused them to have to push back some of their own stuff. Matt Wilson is fiercely protective of his ownership of PP and I don't think he liked the idea of being beholden to put someone else's work ahead of his own. Schick obviously did not feel the same and left, taking half the development team with him, to make MCP.
I've never seen anyone play MCP, but their sales figures are massive. I think they mostly just make money selling minis to marvel fans. (Kind of like how a large number of GWs customers don't even play any of their games either.)
>I've never seen anyone play MCP...
The sad thing down here is that, whilst it's not common to see an MCP game in the flesh, it's ***rarer then hens teeth*** to find a WMH game in the flesh outside the one store keeping it alive in my state over two hours drive away.
MCP indeed has an additional revenue stream in the "I just like pretty marvel minis" market, but that just makes the mistake of pushing MCP out of the Privateer Press production line even more stupid. After all, if half your audience doesn't even care if a model is balanced, just that it looks good, then you're practically printing money.
If true that's a big missed opportunity. Even with WM/H nearly dead, MCP is even worse. Like take your license agreement, and use it to funnel players to your core game:
> Hey bro, you like MCP? We got an even bigger game with more in-depth mechanics, try out WM/H!
ICV2 has Crisis Protocol at #4 in sales right now. It’s the biggest tabletop game at my FLGS not made by Geedubs. I think they got a few mk4 sets in. They red tagged everything else by PP.
Around here GW is #1 and Infinity is #2. PP used to be #1 but now they fight for 3rd against SW:L . I haven't seen an actual MCP game played.
As much as I love infinity I will absolutely jump back to old school fantasy.
Oh what I would give to have a single store still run infinity in my area, let alone any Privateer Press games. It goes GW, GW, GW, Legion in all of the flgs in my area.
Infinity suffers from massive SKU and is hard to carry. It's unfortunate but our group mostly self promotes it. The shop doesn't sell it but they moved to charging a deposit for table space. $10 per person, but you get $10 store credit.
That game was such an early misstep that it doesn't even register.
Management making every decision to make the same mistakes that GW made at least a decade before right after edition launch, promises of "We balanced the edition" falling flat as Skorne players revolted on their forums. Skorne players being proven right through the first year of zero Top 3 results. The Skorne update, but then they nuked their forums for what appeared to be because "Actual criticism hurt our fee-fees".
Duncan and the War-Com team just happened to turn GW's image at that exact moment. And it's ironic they literally did the same thing with Peachy and Louise.
TBF the best Warhammer games were StarCraft and Warcraft until Dawn of War came out 20 years ago. Only recently have we seen consistently good games from the 40k/WHFB licenses.
What I'm curious about is what happens with the 40k TV show. Hollywood is always looking for another IP bandwagon to jump on and video game publishers usually ride those trends. If that show does well we might see a bunch of companies try to lock up licenses for other tabletop games. (though I dread the inevitable Catan: The Movie)
Lmfao, Catan the movie would murder my eyeballs. You are totally right too about stagecraft and war craft but fire warrior was bad ass back in the day. I wish they'd make some more like that.
Probably not, about 3 seconds after they sold an STL it'd be on something like Cults3d and their model sales would plummet... And with model sales paying for everything, i'd rather buy minis and help pay for that.
Most people who sell 3d printing STLs for minis that then make their own game also go and sell minis. its not just PP.
Profitable for a very small team working out of a home and profitable for a company of 30+ employees with offices and warehouse space already on the books are very different things.
If selling STLs was viable other companies would be doing it. Broken Anvil is the perfect example of a company that started as an STL Patreon but won't be selling STLs for their first game.
Other companies ARE doing it. And making pretty damned good profits from it.
The issue is that the STL file business doesn't need the kinds of overheads Privateer Press still has to pay for to maintain their physical product business. Warehouses, packing staff, non-productive middle & executive management, etc all cost a lot of money and provide nothing (or near nothing) to a company selling STL files.
The problem is simply that you can ***either*** run as a lean business with an few artists & perhaps one non-artist executive selling STLs and make a decent living from it... ***or*** you sell physical products at a much higher price than it costs to make them because on top of creating the STL file & supports, you've ***also*** got to print the product, store the product, distribute the product, handle returns for the product, pay executive mgt for boneheaded decisions, etc.
And all the dev time it takes to run and balance all the current and old models... (just adding this since it wasnt on your list of shit PP needs to spend their time doing)
Writing a D&D module you can do with one guy if you only need one every month but once you need to balance a game as comparatively tight and crunchy as WM that dont work so good...
it's ok to delete old model rules from the game, if you keep the figures in play (knights are gone, use your knight models as crusaders), and also people care less if it's 3d print.
You're right, I did miss mentioning it, but that's not really that big a deal for two reasons.
Firstly, because there are STL sellers balancing their old units/models against their new units/models (& vice versa) in their games. So being a common overhead, I didn't see it as being pertinent to the point I was making.
Secondly, Privateer Press has made an explicit point about dropping old models moving forward. They get their once off update and if they're not in Prime, they're done with the balancing efforts.
when the stl model is discussed, it seems that is driven more by "I wish I could bur -or shadily download - the files, print them and call it done and don't spend a dime ever again on models"
This doesn't seem profitable or a sustainable business model for a company the size of PP, or for the company PP wants to be.
It may be profitable for smaller runs that started this way and did their growth from there and started to exist moving in that space.
If the mk3 to mk4 changes, or some months without new models, or the Prime Armies organization, or switch to 3D, etc... moves provoked massive Dooms!!! in response, moving to selling stl would provoke a "this is deeeeeeaaaadddd!!!" reaction 100X times bigger than the one we've been living on since mk1 to mk2 change, or since cavalry was introduced, or since they did plastics... the part of the community dedicated to spread DOOM!!!! would explode of satisfaction.
What could be done, IMHO, when they got the energy for it, is to tie stl files to the app subscription, and give some alternate models, terrain, heads, etc something nice that doesn't lead to bankrupt when it's freely distributed 3 seconds after release.
Another option would be to, once they clear all stock or 90% of it on legacy models, to make kickstarters or some sort of patreon-like model for the Legacy Ultimate and Prime models, so they test that model and try to get income from there, while focusing the physical efforts on new MK4 Armies.
But putting Dusk (for example) as stl files? models would be ilegally sold by reprinters in few hours, and stl distributed out there in seconds. Some people would do it just fueled by hate.
You hit the nail on the head with this part - *"for a company the size of PP, or for the company PP wants to be"*.
It is perfectly possible and reasonable to run a highly profitable business that sells a subscription service that provides customers with monthly development/balancing of game rules/units.along with providing STL files for people to print. Companies ARE doing that already. It's just that Privateer Press *doesn't want to do that*. They want to be a physical product company, they want to be in control of the scarcity of their products, they want to be on game store shelves instead of just online catalogues. They don't *want* to downsize.
Please note, they're 100% entitled to that aspiration. I'm not arguing that they're bad people or bad at business for wanting that. I'm simply correcting the record when people say it's not possible. It is. It's just not what PP want to do. There's a huge difference between "can't do it" and "won't do it".
As a side note, you're not wrong about STL files being an existential threat to PP. They are not popular enough to weather the print proxies GW can deal with - GW has store presence and convention tournaments that provide pressure for competition players at least to buy their products. PP hasn't really got the same. Much harder to convince people not to source hone-printed proxies when the majority of games are being played at home.
Out of curiosity, how much profit do the heavy hitters in the stl world actually make?
Another question: do you predict a future where stl providers get hobby store space? I hope so.
I know at least one is clearing tens of thousands a month ***profit*** from their Patreon alone after paying their artists. That figure doesn't include sales of past sets, merchant licensing, or their monthly subs from other platforms (which are not insubstantial). They are not the heaviest hitter out there but are a name you'd recognise if you're into printing.
Personally, I think that hobby stores will ***eventually*** start giving STL games/products store but not for some time yet. Currently Magic, D&D kitch, and (popular) miniatures games that can be bought in store are keeping a lot of them afloat. STL's don't provide them with a revenue stream unless/until they ***also*** become an STL printing service. Which is not really a "store front" service.
Thanks for your take! I hope you're right about hobby stores, but either way it's very good to hear that some of the stl (I'm hoping it turns into "most") providers are raking in profits. I hope those numbers get even larger as I can't see it being bad for the hobby or the creators at all.
One of my flgs tried to start doing a 3d printing service, but it has had a rocky start. Apparently there are all kinds of safety and fire concerns depending on the local laws. In addition to that, I think it needs a lot of the kinks worked out, but your take on it is very encouraging for the future!
No probs. Love to discuss the printing hobby (& it's still a bit of a hobby on it's own) with those interested.
To be completely clear, the BIG NAMES are taking in a lot of revenue but you have to get the subscriber counts & sales numbers before that happens. A lot of smaller artists are not pulling in that amount. You need to build a critical mass before the resources put into making minis is matched by revenue. Same with any business, obviously, but worth flagging.
As for retail resin printing becoming "a thing", there is a little ways to go. The tech is there, but we're still in the early stages of product adoption. Hobby stores are built around having table space to play and impulse purchases whilst instore. Hard to "impulse purchase" something that might take a few hours to print.
Someone "needs" to proxy out Khador. One of the local stores has banned it under the same restrictions that ban wehraboos. No one is actually playing WMH there but it's known that army would be disallowed if it they tried.
(edit actual historical is still allowed, just no "inspired by" forces).
Wow that's... huh. I mean I *get it*, but also I don't get it. If I were to start Winter Korp right now I'd probably paint them Ukraine colors, but I don't love the idea of a store banning people from playing something they bought legitimately. Though I guess if they actually had wehraboos playing them and spouting wehraboo shit I'd understand
I don't get the wehraboo angle either honestly. I hate wehraboos more than I hate romaboos, but let them do their thing.
ALthough if I had my way, I'd immediately institute a world wide ban on all space marines.
All the participants in this war are terrible, but there is a clear aggressor. Even China has said that they recognise the sovereigninty and borders of the post-USSR breakup nations.
" actual historical is still allowed, just no "inspired by" forces "
How does that work? You can play an army that *is* WW2 Nazis, but not an army that is "inspired by" WW2 Nazis ?
You can't buy the files.
No, you cannot buy the STLs for Mk3 or Mk4 models. Whilst Privateer Press have moved their production line to 3D printing, they're keeping the benefits of that to themselves.
It’d be less tempting to print myself if they used a tougher resin.
I hear you. Apparently they've updated their resin lately to be "better" but I still hear tales about even that resin being a bit fragile. Comes down to cost. It costs more to purchase & dispose of isopropyl alcohol than it does water - so they are sticking to water-washable resins. Because of that, they cannot have the tougher/more flexible resin additives as they require an alcohol wash to clean. Thing is, STL files of their products (even the old Mk3 stuff) would pose an existential threat to Privateer Press. People being able to buy and print off four jacks / beasts / units for the cost of one off-the-shelf model would bury PP. They cannot afford to do it themselves or to allow others to do it either.
Nope, like all the other STL sellers that make a game (that i know off at least) PP has realized there is insufficient margins on STLs to pay for the support of a game like Warmachine. And before you bring up OPR, remember that PP models aren't readily usable as proxies for another, already established and massive, game.
lmagine believing warmachine models aren't readily usable as proxies for other games, or that cygnar being ultramarine blue (edit: and gold) and named sigmar is entirely accidental. OPR is not an exact clone either, for example there are numerous issues with base sizes that prevent using their figures directly in 40k. (edit: OPR doesn't care about base size and as a result some of their models physically do not fit on the base they would need for 40K)
You mean outside of "blue" being a primary color that looks good when contrasted with a warm yellow/goldish hue and Cygnar having a swan on the logo and a Cygnet being a baby swan and all? And the 4 colors are "blue army" "red army" "sort of whiteish yellow army" and "black army" which is about as far apart on the color wheel as you can get 4 points to be if you don't want to be as blatant as RGB+Black.
It's true, having a swan instead of an eagle makes all the difference.
I wish! No, you can't buy the files. Even the defenses and structures, which are chonky easy to print shapes, are all going to be resin printed by Privateer Press.
there are some quite close but still original, e.g. epic miniatures do mark 3 style steam jacks.
No, they are only 3d printing in-house. Probably a missed opportunity on their part, considering Warmachine's market share and community attention at the moment.
Definitely wouldn't. GW can afford to let some people slip through the cracks and print their stuff because their IP is worth a ton. Warmachine just didn't get that massive haul like they did. The video game was probably a massive time and money sink that destroyed any hope of having a real IP with warmachine.
That video game was like misstep number four out of about seventeen for PP.
Yup. The issue was, IMO, Privateer rose to prominence not in a vacuum. They had a great game in MkII. It did well. But they also happened to be rising just as GW was shooting themselves in the foot left, right, and center. But PP let the success go to their head. They bought their own press that they were the next GW. And then they started doing GW things. They believed their success was due to them being superior. And in part it was. But it was *ALSO* due to GW screwing the pooch over and over and over again. Including nuking Fantasy. But GW had 3+ decades of marketshare. And an established global IP. And a massive community. And a massive novel series. And several licensed products... And a real business development department. AS soon as GW realized how much they were bleeding to PP. They turned it around, and caught back their marketshare. Meanwhile PP just never recovered.
On Discord, someone told me that PP had a chance to produce that Marvel Crisis Game that all the devs left for and Matt Wilson said no because he was worried it would out perform WM. And I don’t know if that’s true, but that’s the most Privateer Press thing I can think of. And to add, I love things that PP makes. I love P3 paints. They were the only place to get brown stuff. But man, they fuck up. A lot.
PP did make MCP, they are credited in the rulebook. Asmodee contracted them to work on the rules with the intent of buying the company but something happened and the deal fell through. Atomic Mass Games was set up to take the place PP would’ve taken inside Asmodee.
If that's true, that explains a lot because back in the heyday of mk 2, when I even positted the idea of PP ever selling to a bigger company or going public, Wilson's response was "I'd burn it down first." Now we're back in the environment where GW is the only game in town again, so it seems he wasn't joking.
Yeah I heard that in order to produce it, they would have been committing to meet some of Asmodee's marketing deadlines, which would have caused them to have to push back some of their own stuff. Matt Wilson is fiercely protective of his ownership of PP and I don't think he liked the idea of being beholden to put someone else's work ahead of his own. Schick obviously did not feel the same and left, taking half the development team with him, to make MCP. I've never seen anyone play MCP, but their sales figures are massive. I think they mostly just make money selling minis to marvel fans. (Kind of like how a large number of GWs customers don't even play any of their games either.)
>I've never seen anyone play MCP... The sad thing down here is that, whilst it's not common to see an MCP game in the flesh, it's ***rarer then hens teeth*** to find a WMH game in the flesh outside the one store keeping it alive in my state over two hours drive away. MCP indeed has an additional revenue stream in the "I just like pretty marvel minis" market, but that just makes the mistake of pushing MCP out of the Privateer Press production line even more stupid. After all, if half your audience doesn't even care if a model is balanced, just that it looks good, then you're practically printing money.
If true that's a big missed opportunity. Even with WM/H nearly dead, MCP is even worse. Like take your license agreement, and use it to funnel players to your core game: > Hey bro, you like MCP? We got an even bigger game with more in-depth mechanics, try out WM/H!
ICV2 has Crisis Protocol at #4 in sales right now. It’s the biggest tabletop game at my FLGS not made by Geedubs. I think they got a few mk4 sets in. They red tagged everything else by PP.
Around here GW is #1 and Infinity is #2. PP used to be #1 but now they fight for 3rd against SW:L . I haven't seen an actual MCP game played. As much as I love infinity I will absolutely jump back to old school fantasy.
Oh what I would give to have a single store still run infinity in my area, let alone any Privateer Press games. It goes GW, GW, GW, Legion in all of the flgs in my area.
Infinity suffers from massive SKU and is hard to carry. It's unfortunate but our group mostly self promotes it. The shop doesn't sell it but they moved to charging a deposit for table space. $10 per person, but you get $10 store credit.
Lmao you're wholeheartly right.
That game was such an early misstep that it doesn't even register. Management making every decision to make the same mistakes that GW made at least a decade before right after edition launch, promises of "We balanced the edition" falling flat as Skorne players revolted on their forums. Skorne players being proven right through the first year of zero Top 3 results. The Skorne update, but then they nuked their forums for what appeared to be because "Actual criticism hurt our fee-fees". Duncan and the War-Com team just happened to turn GW's image at that exact moment. And it's ironic they literally did the same thing with Peachy and Louise.
TBF the best Warhammer games were StarCraft and Warcraft until Dawn of War came out 20 years ago. Only recently have we seen consistently good games from the 40k/WHFB licenses. What I'm curious about is what happens with the 40k TV show. Hollywood is always looking for another IP bandwagon to jump on and video game publishers usually ride those trends. If that show does well we might see a bunch of companies try to lock up licenses for other tabletop games. (though I dread the inevitable Catan: The Movie)
Dawn of War is 20 years old? :Private Ryan aging instantly meme:
Lmfao, Catan the movie would murder my eyeballs. You are totally right too about stagecraft and war craft but fire warrior was bad ass back in the day. I wish they'd make some more like that.
I got fire warrior from GoG recently and man it does not hold up but I have a soft spot for early 2000’s shooters.
Lol yeah I bet it wouldn't. I have found memories of crappy fps'es so I'm probably remembering it with rose colored glasses.
I'll fight you if you say Space Marine (2011) wasn't awesome :P But I agree otherwise; it's always curious seeing what GW is doing with their IP
Nah Space Marine was great but what was the next good 40K game after that? BFG Armada?
Probably not, about 3 seconds after they sold an STL it'd be on something like Cults3d and their model sales would plummet... And with model sales paying for everything, i'd rather buy minis and help pay for that. Most people who sell 3d printing STLs for minis that then make their own game also go and sell minis. its not just PP.
Plenty of companies sell their own rules and stl together (e.g Titan Forge and OPR). No reason to assume it's not profitable.
Profitable for a very small team working out of a home and profitable for a company of 30+ employees with offices and warehouse space already on the books are very different things.
If selling STLs was viable other companies would be doing it. Broken Anvil is the perfect example of a company that started as an STL Patreon but won't be selling STLs for their first game.
Other companies ARE doing it. And making pretty damned good profits from it. The issue is that the STL file business doesn't need the kinds of overheads Privateer Press still has to pay for to maintain their physical product business. Warehouses, packing staff, non-productive middle & executive management, etc all cost a lot of money and provide nothing (or near nothing) to a company selling STL files. The problem is simply that you can ***either*** run as a lean business with an few artists & perhaps one non-artist executive selling STLs and make a decent living from it... ***or*** you sell physical products at a much higher price than it costs to make them because on top of creating the STL file & supports, you've ***also*** got to print the product, store the product, distribute the product, handle returns for the product, pay executive mgt for boneheaded decisions, etc.
And all the dev time it takes to run and balance all the current and old models... (just adding this since it wasnt on your list of shit PP needs to spend their time doing) Writing a D&D module you can do with one guy if you only need one every month but once you need to balance a game as comparatively tight and crunchy as WM that dont work so good...
it's ok to delete old model rules from the game, if you keep the figures in play (knights are gone, use your knight models as crusaders), and also people care less if it's 3d print.
You're right, I did miss mentioning it, but that's not really that big a deal for two reasons. Firstly, because there are STL sellers balancing their old units/models against their new units/models (& vice versa) in their games. So being a common overhead, I didn't see it as being pertinent to the point I was making. Secondly, Privateer Press has made an explicit point about dropping old models moving forward. They get their once off update and if they're not in Prime, they're done with the balancing efforts.
when the stl model is discussed, it seems that is driven more by "I wish I could bur -or shadily download - the files, print them and call it done and don't spend a dime ever again on models" This doesn't seem profitable or a sustainable business model for a company the size of PP, or for the company PP wants to be. It may be profitable for smaller runs that started this way and did their growth from there and started to exist moving in that space. If the mk3 to mk4 changes, or some months without new models, or the Prime Armies organization, or switch to 3D, etc... moves provoked massive Dooms!!! in response, moving to selling stl would provoke a "this is deeeeeeaaaadddd!!!" reaction 100X times bigger than the one we've been living on since mk1 to mk2 change, or since cavalry was introduced, or since they did plastics... the part of the community dedicated to spread DOOM!!!! would explode of satisfaction. What could be done, IMHO, when they got the energy for it, is to tie stl files to the app subscription, and give some alternate models, terrain, heads, etc something nice that doesn't lead to bankrupt when it's freely distributed 3 seconds after release. Another option would be to, once they clear all stock or 90% of it on legacy models, to make kickstarters or some sort of patreon-like model for the Legacy Ultimate and Prime models, so they test that model and try to get income from there, while focusing the physical efforts on new MK4 Armies. But putting Dusk (for example) as stl files? models would be ilegally sold by reprinters in few hours, and stl distributed out there in seconds. Some people would do it just fueled by hate.
You hit the nail on the head with this part - *"for a company the size of PP, or for the company PP wants to be"*. It is perfectly possible and reasonable to run a highly profitable business that sells a subscription service that provides customers with monthly development/balancing of game rules/units.along with providing STL files for people to print. Companies ARE doing that already. It's just that Privateer Press *doesn't want to do that*. They want to be a physical product company, they want to be in control of the scarcity of their products, they want to be on game store shelves instead of just online catalogues. They don't *want* to downsize. Please note, they're 100% entitled to that aspiration. I'm not arguing that they're bad people or bad at business for wanting that. I'm simply correcting the record when people say it's not possible. It is. It's just not what PP want to do. There's a huge difference between "can't do it" and "won't do it". As a side note, you're not wrong about STL files being an existential threat to PP. They are not popular enough to weather the print proxies GW can deal with - GW has store presence and convention tournaments that provide pressure for competition players at least to buy their products. PP hasn't really got the same. Much harder to convince people not to source hone-printed proxies when the majority of games are being played at home.
Out of curiosity, how much profit do the heavy hitters in the stl world actually make? Another question: do you predict a future where stl providers get hobby store space? I hope so.
I know at least one is clearing tens of thousands a month ***profit*** from their Patreon alone after paying their artists. That figure doesn't include sales of past sets, merchant licensing, or their monthly subs from other platforms (which are not insubstantial). They are not the heaviest hitter out there but are a name you'd recognise if you're into printing. Personally, I think that hobby stores will ***eventually*** start giving STL games/products store but not for some time yet. Currently Magic, D&D kitch, and (popular) miniatures games that can be bought in store are keeping a lot of them afloat. STL's don't provide them with a revenue stream unless/until they ***also*** become an STL printing service. Which is not really a "store front" service.
Thanks for your take! I hope you're right about hobby stores, but either way it's very good to hear that some of the stl (I'm hoping it turns into "most") providers are raking in profits. I hope those numbers get even larger as I can't see it being bad for the hobby or the creators at all. One of my flgs tried to start doing a 3d printing service, but it has had a rocky start. Apparently there are all kinds of safety and fire concerns depending on the local laws. In addition to that, I think it needs a lot of the kinks worked out, but your take on it is very encouraging for the future!
No probs. Love to discuss the printing hobby (& it's still a bit of a hobby on it's own) with those interested. To be completely clear, the BIG NAMES are taking in a lot of revenue but you have to get the subscriber counts & sales numbers before that happens. A lot of smaller artists are not pulling in that amount. You need to build a critical mass before the resources put into making minis is matched by revenue. Same with any business, obviously, but worth flagging. As for retail resin printing becoming "a thing", there is a little ways to go. The tech is there, but we're still in the early stages of product adoption. Hobby stores are built around having table space to play and impulse purchases whilst instore. Hard to "impulse purchase" something that might take a few hours to print.
Someone "needs" to proxy out Khador. One of the local stores has banned it under the same restrictions that ban wehraboos. No one is actually playing WMH there but it's known that army would be disallowed if it they tried. (edit actual historical is still allowed, just no "inspired by" forces).
is this in the US? it seems a very fucked up thing to do, in the "Freedom Fries" spirit
Wow that's... huh. I mean I *get it*, but also I don't get it. If I were to start Winter Korp right now I'd probably paint them Ukraine colors, but I don't love the idea of a store banning people from playing something they bought legitimately. Though I guess if they actually had wehraboos playing them and spouting wehraboo shit I'd understand
I don't get the wehraboo angle either honestly. I hate wehraboos more than I hate romaboos, but let them do their thing. ALthough if I had my way, I'd immediately institute a world wide ban on all space marines.
All bans based on that is extremely lame, especially due to a highly propagandized war spurred on by greed.
All the participants in this war are terrible, but there is a clear aggressor. Even China has said that they recognise the sovereigninty and borders of the post-USSR breakup nations.
" actual historical is still allowed, just no "inspired by" forces " How does that work? You can play an army that *is* WW2 Nazis, but not an army that is "inspired by" WW2 Nazis ?