Buy A Warhammer 40k Space Marine Chapter For $11K

[Echo136]

Can i instead pay $11k for the next Dawn of War game?

 

[Weaver]

There's a lot of things I would rather spend $11k on.

 

[Cracker3011]

This is listed on their site under 'army essentials' for the Space Marines.

Sure GW, sure.

 

[Elijah Newton]

Can i instead pay $11k for the next Dawn of War game?

Man, no kidding. All too often playing DoW I'd look at the units in game and think, "It'd've cost a fortune to field this and taken forever to play this out."

Hope the next iteration includes base building again. I had a really hard time getting into DoW 2 myself and I think it was in part due to the lack of it. It just felt a little off.

 

[Raziel]

For $12K you'd think they'd do a much better job with the listing and promos.

 

[Quazimofo]

$11,690 for 1200 units?

Not at all precise math means that each unit is 10 bucks.

I'm not sure if that's more or less than the normal prices, but damn is that expensive.

That's normal prices.

I checked out their webpage the other day and their boxed army sets are the same prices as if you bought all the figures individually.

There's absolutely no discount here whatsoever.

With the money I've already sunk into my Dark Angels that sounds about right. Combine that with the cost of paint and it hurts the hip pocket.

Technically you save about $200 usd (from my own maths on the subject), but glue, paints, and brushes (citadel or not) would easily put you over that 200 saved. This is a less than 1% discount for basically bragging rights. I don't envy anyone who buys this.

Now if they actually added some new units to the tau (as i count only 3 new units and some new characters (note one of the new units is effectively a sergeant) from the most recent book) and then put out a kavaal (about the size of one of the larger ig regiments), i'd probably be at least somewhat tempted. Then i'd realize the stupid time investment needed to assemble these, let alone store and paint them, and decide against it.

It's a shame it's taking GW this long to realize their biggest problem is excessive markup. For example, when they wholesale to some retailers, it's 50% of the sticker price. IIRC a significant portion of their income is from such sales, thus cost of production is likely much lower. Also, characters of near identical size, whether plastic or resin, can vary in price from $10-15 to $30, which is stupid because a net increase in resin usage of 10% is not equivalent to a 100% price increase.

Hopefully their profits will decrease at such a rate that they can realize what went wrong before and fix it before dying completely. And believe me, their profits will decrease. Maybe not this year. Maybe not next. But they will decrease. You can only fire so many employees and you can only reduce overhead so much before the true problem, lack of proper advertisement and excessive prices severely limiting purchase volume of the majority of customers if not outright dissuading people from purchasing, becomes apparent.

Once the pricing problem is solved, then I hope they'll finally make better use of the wealth of xenos factions they are sitting on to get more model diversity. Seriously, every faction is at least 20k years old (with the exception of tau). Are you telling me they have less than 20 functional/active vehicle designs? Across millions of worlds? With a standing army of Trillions if not quadrillions? With 7 or 8 factions each with unique fighting styles to combat, discounting rebels within the imperium who haven't been augmented by chaos? And that's just the imperium. Yeah, with forgeworld's expansion it's less ridiculous, for the imperium. For all of the other alien factions, they have nearly the same exact complaints, but with fewer soldiers numerically and millennia more to develop weapons tech (especially eldar and necrons, and orks who have a mix of EVERYTHING from looting.)
Except for the tau, but they are supposed to be rapidly designing and inventing new shit to meet new challenges. Yet they have 6 non-vehicle units in their core army (sans auxiliaries), and one of those is an old model for the stealthsuit designs. I find this very hard to believe that after centuries of conflict with most of the races in the setting they haven't developed new stuff. Even forgeworld adds only a couple new suits and just variants on the core.
Ludicrous that more new units are hardly even mentioned in the fluff, let alone given models.

 

[Quazimofo]

Can i instead pay $11k for the next Dawn of War game?

Man, no kidding. All too often playing DoW I'd look at the units in game and think, "It'd've cost a fortune to field this and taken forever to play this out."

Hope the next iteration includes base building again. I had a really hard time getting into DoW 2 myself and I think it was in part due to the lack of it. It just felt a little off.

Certainly it was a bit off for dawn of war, but if you enjoyed the small-squad style that relic did for Company of Heroes, particularly Tales of Valor, then DOW II was an excellent version of that, but with space marines. If only assault marines didn't get killed so easily without terminator armor. Anyway, for what it was, DoW II was excellent. It was just a bit odd for DOW

Hopefully relic can fulfill their promises of much more customization in DoW 3. I'd love to be able to customize the army a bit more than just unit upgrades. Perhaps actually pick the loadout of squads beforehand, or be like Starcraft 2 with mutations on units (like alternate pattern predators or a pimped out battlewagon or assorted crisis suit loadouts) that you can decide to bring before missions.

Heh, if they were feeling particularly adventurous they could include some Forgeworld units or even make up their own (like they made up the vengeance launcher, but more significant).


Captcha: Moon cheese. Is that what they call stupidly long campaigns on moons? Because I can totally see that being slang.

 

[Jessta]

You could buy 3D printer and hire an artist to design your own chapter for that much. Its a shame i could probably quite enjoy Warhammer, if not take it seriously, but every time i go and have a look, i just look at the prices and think fuck that.

I think it would cost quite a bit more to have an artist design 1200 different models, it takes between 4-20 hours to make a full 3d model just for one model not to mention a 3D printer costs about 1500-2000 dollars and to print that much stuff would be another 1000 so the artist would have to be working for about 90 cents an hour to make all those models.

Hell even assuming each model only took one hour (which would be a VERY VERY quick 3D modeler) the average annual wage for a trained freelance 3D artist is 20,000-30,000 and it would take 150 days to make each model at an hour a day working 8 hours a day (fulltime) that means it would cost you about 10,000, 15,000 assuming the modeler was very, very good and working for near amateur wages.

Tl;DR, artists gotta eat bro.

 

[Waaghpowa]

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Sorry, I just had a massive nerdgasm.

As much as I like Ultramarines, it would be nice to have other chapters represented eventually.

Also given the cost of this, I don't think there would be the problem of finding a place to put them, since you must live in a large mansion of some kind.

 

[Psychobabble]

Well look at it this way. It's still cheaper than actual real life warfare. Well only just.

 

[Ninjat_126]

$11,690 for 1200 units?

Not at all precise math means that each unit is 10 bucks.

I'm not sure if that's more or less than the normal prices, but damn is that expensive.

I've only ever tried to pay attention to the Tau, but last time I checked 3 Huge Ass Battlesuits were about $80.


I'm glad they've done this, if only just to be on the level about it all. "You want to play our game the way it was intended? That'll be $10,000."

 

[takemeouttotheblack]

You could buy 3D printer and hire an artist to design your own chapter for that much. Its a shame i could probably quite enjoy Warhammer, if not take it seriously, but every time i go and have a look, i just look at the prices and think fuck that.

I think it would cost quite a bit more to have an artist design 1200 different models, it takes between 4-20 hours to make a full 3d model just for one model not to mention a 3D printer costs about 1500-2000 dollars and to print that much stuff would be another 1000 so the artist would have to be working for about 90 cents an hour to make all those models.

Hell even assuming each model only took one hour (which would be a VERY VERY quick 3D modeler) the average annual wage for a trained freelance 3D artist is 20,000-30,000 and it would take 150 days to make each model at an hour a day working 8 hours a day (fulltime) that means it would cost you about 10,000, 15,000 assuming the modeler was very, very good and working for near amateur wages.

Tl;DR, artists gotta eat bro.

The problem with that is that the majority of the models will be copies of the same ten base templates, so what you're really looking at is maybe a maximum of maybe fifty different models (Maybe ten tactical, five assault, five devastator, five scout, five terminator, and the rest tanks, transports and special characters). Taking that into account, you get three grand production costs, and then maybe 50 days working costs at the most, which is only 5000 given the 30,000 average wage. At the end of that, you're talking 8000 production costs, and then you've got the designs which you can then market and sell for bumper profit.

 

[ShipofFools]

So, I'm part of a tabletop and boardgame club, and Games Workshop is pretty much dead there, mostly because of the prices.
Everybody used to be really into 40K, until one by one people decided they couldn't afford it anymore.
Other reasons are the insane decision to switch from metal to horribly bendy and rubbery "finecast", some kind of cheap resin. The resin models are more expensive then the metal ones. Fuck you, games workshop!


***
Off topic, but whatever.
Hey, you guys, there are other miniature companies then Games Workshop! Here are some of my favorite tabletop wargames from other companies:

Spoiler: Dystopian Wars, the world at war in a Victorian sci fi setting. Very sweet models of battleships, steam powered tanks and airships!

Spoiler: Dystopian Legions, same setting as Dystopian Wars, but on a different scale with infantry models and whatnot.

Spoiler: Infinity, sci fi manga skirmish game, very tactical and fast paced in my opinion.

 

[knight steel]

Well look at it this way. It's still cheaper than actual real life warfare. Well only just.

Now if we could just somehow convince the world superpower's to solve their problems through warhammer 40k gaming sessions instead of wars think how great the world could be!
"And Obama has just sent his ultra marines against Putin's Tau Fire warriors and is now engaging in combat Ladies and gentlemen this battle will determine Syria's fate"

 

[J Tyran]

Its a huge price but you cannot really go by averaging it out per unit, some of the miniatures are fairly large and expensive like the ten (seriously, ten fugging Landraiders!) Landraider models which would be £45 each and the various Gunships (10 in total).

That some figures are more expensive than others does not negate the accuracy of the "average cost per unit" figure.

Given that each marine figure retails for about $5 per, the volume of troop units will offset the expensive units like the landraiders. The average of $10 per figure is still technically correct.

The retail cost of the pack is also still the same as the retail cost of the individual units. That's been GW's practice for every other army box and they've no reason to offer any sort of discount for this specific bundle.

It also comes with printed materials like the Codex and the Unique book detailing the squad by squad and unit by unit markings and heraldry, that book took a lot of work. As mentioned further down in the thread its also discounted by 11%, averaging it out still doesn't work though. It doesn't have a few large units it has loads, every single Predator, Vindicator, Dreadnought, Venerable Dreadnought, Landspeeder, Whirlwind and every other vehicle a Chapter has. Several Hundred of those models are large units, now I will totally agree that Game Workshop charge an excessive amount. You will get no argument from me there, in fact its one of the reasons[footnote]And also the way they keep dumping support for smaller games like Inquisitor (my favourite game, part miniature TT wargame and part pen and paper RPG), Necromunda, Gorkamorka and so on.[/footnote] I dumped why I packed up playing table top.

 

[Psychobabble]

Well look at it this way. It's still cheaper than actual real life warfare. Well only just.

Now if we could just somehow convince the world superpower's to solve their problems through warhammer 40k gaming sessions instead of wars think how great the world could be!
"And Obama has just sent his ultra marines against Putin's Tau Fire warriors and is now engaging in combat Ladies and gentlemen this battle will determine Syria's fate"

That has to be the most ridiculous idea I've ever heard ... Putin is so obviously an Imperial Guards player. Other than that, yeah sounds like a good idea.

 

[Mangod]

Well look at it this way. It's still cheaper than actual real life warfare. Well only just.

Now if we could just somehow convince the world superpower's to solve their problems through warhammer 40k gaming sessions instead of wars think how great the world could be!
"And Obama has just sent his ultra marines against Putin's Tau Fire warriors and is now engaging in combat Ladies and gentlemen this battle will determine Syria's fate"

That has to be the most ridiculous idea I've ever heard ... Putin is so obviously an Imperial Guards player. Other than that, yeah sounds like a good idea.

So, if America is the Space Marines, and Russia is the Imperial Guard, and China/Japan (presumably) are the Tau... who're the Chaos Space Marines?

OT: There's a quote I'd like to bring up, because it illustrates so well how f***ing insane Games Workshop are. You ready? Here it comes:

"Games Workshop is in the business of selling toy soldiers to children". - Tom Kirby, Chairman of Games Workshop PLC.

... just out of curiocity, what child has 11.5 grand just laying around?

 

[BanicRhys]

I get burnt out if I'm working on more than one kit at once, if someone gave this to me I'd probably implode.

This is listed on their site under 'army essentials' for the Space Marines.

Sure GW, sure.

Well unfortunately there's no "jokey publicity stunts that we don't expect anyone to purchase" category.

 

[knight steel]

Well look at it this way. It's still cheaper than actual real life warfare. Well only just.

Now if we could just somehow convince the world superpower's to solve their problems through warhammer 40k gaming sessions instead of wars think how great the world could be!
"And Obama has just sent his ultra marines against Putin's Tau Fire warriors and is now engaging in combat Ladies and gentlemen this battle will determine Syria's fate"

That has to be the most ridiculous idea I've ever heard ... Putin is so obviously an Imperial Guards player. Other than that, yeah sounds like a good idea.

Imperial guard of course how could I make such a novice mistake X_X
Oh forgive me God Emperor Forgive me for I your faithful servant have Failed you!!!