The Rumour Thread

[JerekKruger]

11 hours ago, RetconnedLegion said:

Some horrible news about Paul Sawyer

If you’ve been in the Warhammer hobby from the nineties, you’ll know Paul ‘Fat Bloke’ Sawyer. He’s one of the greats.

Yeah, this one hit hard. He pretty much made WD good back in the early 2000s. 

[cyrus]

It is probably the image prospective too but Vizzik seems HUGE !!!!!!! 

 

 

[JerekKruger]

1 hour ago, cyrus said:

It is probably the image prospective too but Vizzik seems HUGE !!!!!!! 

He's taller than a GUO by about a head, so certainly not small. Similar height to existing Verminlords. I think it helps that he's surrounded  tiny Clanrats.

[Acrozatarim]

Someone made this comparison pic. He's considerably chunkier than your common or garden vermin lord.

[KingBrodd]

1 hour ago, cyrus said:

It is probably the image prospective too but Vizzik seems HUGE !!!!!!! 

 

 

He's got to be larger than a Mega Gargant!!

[EonChao]

Not sure if it's been mentioned here but the new Mini of the Month is in fact the pictured model from the Monsta-Killaz (shocking right?) redone on a sprue by itself

[Baron I_oyd]

[Neil Arthur Hotep]

23 minutes ago, EonChao said:

Not sure if it's been mentioned here but the new Mini of the Month is in fact the pictured model from the Monsta-Killaz (shocking right?) redone on a sprue by itself

Mysterious. We always hear about how expensive the tooling for plastic injection molds is and how models need to have a long life span to pay back that initial investment. And then they do stuff like this, re-doing a random battleline guy on a sprue all by himself for a month-long promotion most people won't even take part in.

[GloomkingWortwazi]

41 minutes ago, EonChao said:

Not sure if it's been mentioned here but the new Mini of the Month is in fact the pictured model from the Monsta-Killaz (shocking right?) redone on a sprue by itself

Now that is just odd.

[Vasshpit]

@Neil Arthur Hotep I do not know costs but ive heard like many other things across the webz its not as insane of a cost as we think albeit still not cheap though. 

And if that's the one we get ill pass as it's my least favorite one in my least favorite Kruleboyz kit. 

[Neil Arthur Hotep]

2 minutes ago, Vasshpit said:

@Neil Arthur Hotep I do not know costs but ive heard like many other things across the webz its not as insane of a cost as we think albeit still not cheap though. 

And if that's the one we get ill pass as it's my least favorite one in my least favorite Kruleboyz kit. 

I'm sure there is some explanation there that makes the math work out with regards to cost, but still it's kind of hard to understand why they decided to make a separate sprue with just this particular Kruelboyz grunt in particular when there have been models that people really want to be released separately stuck on combo sprues for years.

[Gotz]

30 minutes ago, Neil Arthur Hotep said:

Mysterious. We always hear about how expensive the tooling for plastic injection molds is and how models need to have a long life span to pay back that initial investment. And then they do stuff like this, re-doing a random battleline guy on a sprue all by himself for a month-long promotion most people won't even take part in.

I believe most, if not all, this year's mini of the month were retooled to a unique sprue.

[Mr_Whateley]

First time they did this with a Warcry model was with the nurgly-humans (Rotmire Creed). Single model sprue AFTER the warband was released, specifically this guy:

[Neil Arthur Hotep]

Just now, Gotz said:

I believe most, if not all, this year's mini of the month were retooled to a unique sprue.

 

Just now, Mr_Whateley said:

First time they did this with a Warcry model was with the nurgly-humans (Rotmire Creed). Single model sprue AFTER the warband was released, specifically this guy:

Maybe they just decide on 12 free models for the year in advance and cut a mold for all of them at the same time, then. That would certainly go some way towards explaining how it could be cost-effective.

[Starfyre]

Steel tools cost hundreds of thousands of pounds, or they certainly used to, so there will be some way of ensuring it's been done efficiently as it's a hefty investment. 

But all part of the cost of bringing customers into their stores over an indie or online discounter, like the coins, and there must be a return on it otherwise they wouldn't do it. 

[Garrac]

1 hour ago, Baron I_oyd said:

Any more details on the bases of everything? Krittock looks surprisingly smaller than I expected

[KingBrodd]

1 hour ago, Baron I_oyd said:

Ah looks smaller here.

[Sarouan]

15 minutes ago, Starfyre said:

But all part of the cost of bringing customers into their stores over an indie or online discounter, like the coins, and there must be a return on it otherwise they wouldn't do it. 

It's made at a loss, simply put. The cost is absorbed by the rest of their big sales (mostly 40k).

The return isn't about money here, but reputation. People are always happy to have free minis, and it's a good way to attract more people in the store, who then may be interested in buying something.

Edited September 4 by Sarouan

[The Brotherhood of Necros]

What do we estimate will be announced for pre-order on Sunday? 

[Tonhel]

Also aluminium moulds are a lot cheaper than steel moulds, but have a much reduced lifespan. So for a short production run a aluminium mould is perfect, but for something that you want to sell for years a steel mould is the way to go.

[Dragon-knight77]

51 minutes ago, Garrac said:

Any more details on the bases of everything? Krittock looks surprisingly smaller than I expected

[Ejecutor]

2 hours ago, Baron I_oyd said:

He looks smaller in this pic.

[Ejecutor]

58 minutes ago, Starfyre said:

Steel tools cost hundreds of thousands of pounds, or they certainly used to, so there will be some way of ensuring it's been done efficiently as it's a hefty investment. 

But all part of the cost of bringing customers into their stores over an indie or online discounter, like the coins, and there must be a return on it otherwise they wouldn't do it. 

Maybe it is a cheaper and less durable mould.

[Ejecutor]

49 minutes ago, Sarouan said:

It's made at a loss, simply put. The cost is absorbed by the rest of their big sales (mostly 40k).

The return isn't about money here, but reputation. People are always happy to have free minis, and it's a good way to attract more people in the store, who then may be interested in buying something.

I don't think there are that many new people getting the mini of the month. Here, based on some friend's experience, they go out of stock in less than two hours.

[EonChao]

For the Mini of the Month, the mould(s) probably come out of the marketing teams budget, or the retail teams budget. Recently Wizards of the Coast announced a new Magic the Gathering booster product that would mostly only be available as part of their Magic Fest events. There was push back from this, the set looks cool and people want to have more access to it, but Mark Rosewater, Head Designer of MtG, intervened and said that the product was funded out of the events team's budget. If they hadn't wanted an exclusive booster set for the Magic Fest events then the product wouldn't exist at all, that we as players weren't losing out on any other products because of it, just that a department that doesn't normally do things like that wanted a product.

So it got me thinking about the various limited edition/freebie minis GW does. We know that like most other big companies they have internal individual budgets by department. That the 40k and AoS teams use part of their budget on paying for the sculpting team to work on their projects. So it also stands to reason that the events or retail team at GW also has a budget to work like that. Miniature of the Month started as a way to get people back into stores as a result of the Covid Pandemic hitting retail spaces hard. It proved successful at that too. So it stands to reason that now it has more of a proven track record that the Retail team are willing to invest of their budget into the program.

The miniatures are already sculpted so there's no need to spend budget on that like they do with the Store Anniversary and Opening Minis, just to get someone to adjust the parts into a new compact sprue of just that mini. Likewise they're running it through all of their stores (last year there 520+ GW/Warhammer official shops around the world) so they know that they'll get significant use out the moulds to cover those. I don't know how many they send out to each store but I would wager that it would probably justify the cost of the mould (and that's before we get into the idea that they could have one mould for the year and print them all in December ahead of the January mini reducing costs even more).