Unpacking the Mystery of Games Workshop's Plastic Pricing

This week, we dive in to the Warhammer secret; What's behind games workshops plastic prices. How much does it actually cost to produce a plastic kit for age of sigmar and warhammer 40k. Spacemarines and Chaos Demons?
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Emil On

Videos edited by Maxime Dader & Viktor Westermark

[SquidmarMiniatures]

An additional cost that could be added as well to these cost; manufacturing the mold. The average cost per A4 would be around $12'000. So for a demon with 3 sprues add an additional $36k, and for the space Marines $12k. There are of course more costs involved but you get the point; making plastic kits are expensive 🫰

[knoise]

I did CAD for injection molding for years . Worked closely with the machinist/ CNC guy. It's a lot to invest to get the mold producing . There was an entire warehouse of molds no longer being used.

[ThisNameWasntUsd]

Don't forget the cost of tooling the sprue, which (according to one of the interviews with John Stallard, ex-GW and now Warlord Games) is about £10, 000 for an a5 sprue. Which is a bit crazy.

[EvilVampMuffin]

My issue is things like Warhammer Old World where they dusting off old kits from 20+ years ago and selling them at modern prices.

[FrozenLaughs]

I remember sitting down with my brother to build one day. He opened up a necron piece (big floating throne?) and I opened up a Gunpla. He saw the sheer amount of runners I pulled out of the box, (like 12) and asked how much it cost. His eyes about popped out of his head when I told him it was about $55. Colored plastic? Yup. Better injection, smaller gates and less wasted plastic? Yup. Snap fit? It's posable and articulated? Yup. 1/3 the price of my Silent King? Yup. He stared at his 3 little runners and was just baffled.

BANDAI needs all the same things GW does to produce injection plastic kits. Artists, designers, production, casting, marketing, etc and they do it from 2 facilities in Japan year round.

GW kits waste a TON of plastic on poorly designed runners, and when you're paying for the TOTAL amount of plastic in the box, ya'll are throwing away just as much as you're using. GW sprue thickness is MASSIVE and could easily be half what it is, and the gates are about 5x bigger than they should be. For the size of the parts, you should be able to pop pieces off the runner without nippers at all, like a Pokemon kit. Just reducing the % amount of wasted plastic would make kits cheaper. GW can't even be bothered to do that.

[logridos]

Don't forget $1.8 million a year for the CEO's salary. He definitely does as much work as 36 designers/painters/engineers making 50k per year. Definitely.

[thealaskanpiper]

I feel that the fact that GW continues to post record profits every year debunks any argument that they need to keep raising their prices all the time. Especially when that come with constantly selling out all new products within minutes of pre-order launches. Along with what seems to be a lack of any desire to fix this problem. I love 40k and most GW minis, but that doesn't excuse how they've chosen to function as a company. It all seems very anti consumer at this point.

[Wease]

There’s a couple of things I’d add to this:
1. When costing a person, using their salary is not really the best way, you need to consider the fully fringed cost of an employee which is what it costs the company to have that employee, not just what the employee is paid. That could be 2x the salary or more.
2. (I see you did mention this but I’ll leave it in anyway) The company has general overheads that have to be paid somehow. These can be the building that people sit in, energy, website, HR, management etc. these will get spread over the cost of everything that is sold.
3. Production set up costs - I see you already commented adding the cost of the mould tool, that will be fairly significant. However in addition to that none of the models are going to be in continual non stop production. They will be made in batches before swapping tools to make something else. Every time you do that the production line shuts down and that time has to be paid for.
4. I don’t know whether GW owns their production facilities or if it’s done through an external supplier but we can be fairly sure they do not make 100% of everything they sell in house. Whenever an external supplier is involved they will charge a markup which is essentially their profit. So the cost of that item has profit for multiple companies in it.

It’s a substantially complicated question. If I put my finger in the air and say are GW charging more than they need to in order to make a ‘reasonable’ overall profit margin (overall meaning across the whole operation not just for that model) I think they are probably are yes, but maybe not by as much as you’d think. But this comes down to a corporate attitude. Try to convince any company to charge less than they can get away with, it isn’t going to happen. Only customer behaviour (not buying the thing) or competition (same thing really) will do that.

[youtubevanced]

Many years ago the production cost of the Battle for Maccrage box (I think it was) leaked. It was around $5 per box landed in the USA. For which they charged about $60 I think. Hard to remember anymore. But it was shockingly low and caused a mild outrage in the community at the extreme mark up back then.
Now you get a single mini for that price instead of a whole starter set. The prices are insane.

[Lachdonin]

Youre missing one major factor. Shareholders.

They aren't something that small privately owned companies need to deal with, but they DO come with additional financial responsibilities that can't just be ignored. For better or worse (mostly worse).

[fastestdraw]

There is a comparison that needs to be made - Gundam. Big IP, plastic manufacture miniatures with somewhat different build requirements but similar tolerances. The total franchise income for gundam is about $870M compared to GW's $ 430M, both have a stack of licencing etc. But bandai is putting out 26 million kits last year, while GW by my napkin maths is looking at closer to 7 million.

These aren't crazy numbers, but if I'm looking for a modeling project in plastic its pretty clear who is coming out ahead. Its 2 sprues (1A4) for £30 for primaris intercessors, while gundam offers 3-4 times as many, often with cool manufacturing.

Gundam put out like 23 ish kits in 2023, while GW, between all their lines, released enough new models that I'm finding it hard to estimate because of all the 'same minature new base' or 'these are now boxed as a combat patrol', and all the various product lines. But it seems to be a lot of really specific niche kits for the various side games and so on.

If you release a new tyranid model, only a small proportion of the players are going out to buy it, which reflects a higher risk for each model release. The biggest reach is new space marines, and look, we're always seeing new space marines. Combined with the game pushing point values for units ever lower and engaging with massive churn - which in turn demands endless new kits - They've kind of forced themselves into a corner where the prices are higher than players would like and they need to keep putting out a lot of releases just to satisfy their fragmented market, keeping the prices high.

My question is, how generic and 'everyone buys it' would a kit have to be for GW to offer gundam level prices?

I've been calling for a generic human infantry kit with faction/game specific upgrade sprues/conversion bits for something like fifteen years now, but thats basically the only product that has reach to all GW's players (if its designed properly and has enough pose variety). One of those a year and a specialist unit for each army and you're still looking at 25 releases, but without the guarantee on sales any lower pricing still looks riskier.

[Haplog]

When I think about some of the bone headed placements on the sprues...

[X.davidWilliams]

Huzzah, , Publicly Traded Companies Will ALWAYS have their Stock Holders Wallets in Mind.

[josepa.a]

In military or Gundam modeling you can buy a box for 50€ and it come with at least 3 or 4 sprues. Keep in mind that these products are sold less than warhammer and therefore production costs are spread over less sales. In addition you have to take into account the economy of scale of GW that makes their costs are reduced. So yes, GW prices are high and are not justifiable by cost or inflation. 25€ for a miniature with a single 10x10 cm sprue is a robbery.

[terryerickson]

You forgot machining the plastic injection molding… +10-20k per mold.

[ricci]

Back when the second version of the Land Raider came out the creation of the metal mold something like £60, 000 at the time and was outsourced like much of the plastics around that time. Skip forward to when the Stompa and Baneblades came out they cost around £150, 000 each for their molds. I even recall back when the Vyper and Falcon first came out GW ran an articles covering some of the work entailed in those projects and mentioning how they cost more than they thought they would and longer.

[thebilldozer]

If the figures came painted they would still be too expensive. I have read warhammer since 2000 and have never felt they were affordable for unbuilt plastic models.

[tonyaldante]

All this video taught me is those artists are not being paid enough relative to the cost of the product, overhead and profit chasing is weighing that down, the ones doing the production itself deserve far more of that pie

[galeforce]

I feel like this is a bit of a dishonest "Look, GW needs to charge a lot because it costs a lot!"
When I started with 40k back in 2008, GW Employees in my area had a 50% discount on models (not paints) and I was told that this is because at 50% GW still makes a profit, but they wouldn't at less. But let's make a comparison (read on!)

Taking into account your listed prizes for the First Idea, Concept Art, and the Sculpting, a large model costs 40.738$, while a squad of small models costs 17.295$. For companies selling STL files for 3D printing, those prizes *should* be the same, but instead of paying Engineers to make the sprue, they are paying Engineers to make the supports. But even if one completely ignores that cost, in the end the STL files sell for way less than GW box sets, even less if you take into account that you can print each STL multiple times rather than only once.

To put this into numbers: (Taking the average for Patreon levels)
OPR has 11.804 Patreons, split up among the 5$ and then 10$ level. That means 11.804 people paying a total of 88.530$ per month. In return, every month they release multiple STLs. Example for march: 1 Superheavy Vehicle, 4 Large Monsters, 1 Vehicle, 5 Squads, 2 Heroes, 8 Terrain pieces (the terrain pieces are smaller, could argue they all count as 2 in total)
Skullforge Studios is a lot smaller, having 1.307 Patreons, split up among the 9$, 13$, or 17$ levels. On average this means the 1.307 people pay a total of 16.991$. In return, every month they too release multiple STLs. Example for February: 7 Squads, 1 Vehicle, 2 Heroes (each with multiple sculpts)

It we plug in the same numbers you used to justify GW's prices, then OPR has spent 330k out of their 88k budget to make the sculpts, and have done so every month for the last couple years. Even worse would it be for Skullforge, who spent 161k out of their 16k budget, and have also been doing so for many months.

As such, in the end, if the values you liste din the video were true, then a lot of other calculations don't add up.

[elpiris]

In Spain a lot of people are turning towards 3d printed models, usually sold by guys who own a 3d printer in 2nd hand apps like wallapop. Those can be proxies or just copies of GW models. Usually they sell them for 20-50% of the price of originals.

Sadly as you point out, the average salary of a country like ours can barely support this hobby. Especially if you have kids or a mortgage, the depressing median salary of 1600€/month is just not going to be enough.

At the end it's just either people in their 30s/40s with way above average salaries, or living with their parents with basically no expenses, who play the game. You barely see any under-25 guy playing.

I guess it's also natural given it's a more of a stay-in and chill hobby, when most people in their 20s in Spain (including myself 10 years ago) prefer to party out.