Why are pieces of plastic so expensive?

Why are pieces of plastic so expensive?

Why hasn't done manufacturer crushed the competition by selling at a reasonable price?

Why are pieces of metal so expensive?

Not an argument.

I'm confused. You find army men chinese knock offs to be expensive? You can have a kg of them for a dollar.

Because wargamers usually don't want generic miniatures. They want specific miniatures.

They don't want a space soldier miniature.
They want platoons of UltraSpace™ SoldierManMen™. With vehicles that match. With interchangeable parts. With extra bits. With UltraSpace™ rulebooks, and UltraSpace™ novel tie-ins and UltraSpace™ terrain.

They don't want to buy miniatures. You can get cheap miniatures already.
They want to buy the UltraSpace™ brand, which has spent decades building up its very specific brand identity, with global marketing.
And you can't undercut the UltraSpace™ brand because the second you produce UltraSpace™ miniatures, UltraSpace™ lawyers will sue you.

So the closest you can do is make Not-UltraSpace™ miniatures. But you don't have global marketing or 40 years of worldbuilding and hundreds of tie-in novels and eight editions of rules and 10 factions. Even at 10c a mini, UltraSpace™ brand still crushes you in marketing and brand recognition and production rate.

And even if you did, there's still the problem - they're by definition not UltraSpace™. There's prestige in having genuine UltraSpace™ miniatures, so most customers who want the UltraSpace™ brand don't want Not-UltraSpace™ miniatures.

I lost my train of thought somewhere. You get the idea. It's not just the cost of the mini that's important.

I think you'll find it's not as cheap as all that.

While makes a valid point, it's also worth acknowledging that the typical miniature wargame do not produce single molded pieces of soft plastic. Rather, they produce many detailed individual pieces of hard plastic which have been carefully tooled to fit together. I have some miniatures of a nineties wargame made from soft plastic, and while they were cheaper to buy, they're also nasty as fuck and impossible to paint up nice (which is another important facet of the hobby).

Historicals are cheap as fuck and available as high quality plastic or metal in all ranges. Go to any historical wargaming club and ask them if they'd pay 2 bucks a piece for line infantry and they'd laugh your ass out of the building.
The answer is: Because many non-historical wargamers are dunces that will happily pay whateverthefuck a company demands for their specific brand.

This. You can get generics (historicals) of similar detail and scale much cheaper, because no one can copyright Landsknechts as opposed to Warhammer Imperial Greatswords, even if both are visually the same.

So why hasn't some manufacturer produced fantasty/sci-fi miniatures at historical prices and dominated the market?

Isn't Infinity dirt-cheap now that I think of it?

Because non-historical gamers don't just want miniatures, they want specific miniatures. The most common argument against non-40k games by GW-only guys always go along the line of "Not muh 40k, not muh aesthetics, not muh style". They'd prefer the actually retarded looking Cadians over more reasonably (not realistically) proportioned troopers simply because of association and the 40k stuff plastered on it. The same shit goes for any staunch loyalists of any brand, with Warmahordes players sneering at undersized pauldrons, Infinity players complaining about a lack of tits and ass and so on.
Price isn't that much of a factor. As long as you are in a "generally acceptable" price range, you are good. Being slightly lower than your competitors helps, but you have nothing to gain from being super cheap, because people won't pick up your game just because it's dirt cheap to play. Look at Mantic for example: They took off because their miniatures were "good enough" to "great" to play WHFB with while being hilariously cheaper than GW, but nobody gives two shits about Warpath, really.
For Wargames, Aesthetic>World>Rules=Price in importance is what reality has shown is the last twenty or thirty years.

It's pretty cheap to play as a game, as all Skirmish Games are by nature, but very expensive per miniature, as Skirmish Games tend to be.

Retailers also make money off of selling them. If the manufacturers sell cheaper, and the retailer can still sell to us at the same price, why would the retail price ever change? If you want the prices lowered, then get people to stop buying figures.

The Evils of Capitalism! In glorious People's Republic we are making the miniature People's Space Army figurines compulsory upon all youths and distributed by People's Bureau of Recreation in every city and town. Is good for children, gives them good practice for future Moon War against Capitalist swine.

The quality would be poorer by necessity and people would stick with the expensive stuff. This happens fairly regularly.

critiquing capitalist practice =/= championing socialist practice, you fucking mongoloid.

Is no joke. People's Revolution is being only hope for Humankind.

>people hate 40k this much and go to these kind of lengths to demean people who enjoy it
Chill.

Production costs are the least part of it. Much of the 40k media universe is wildly underprofitable compared to others on the marketplace. The videogames are all poor sellers, the books (compared to other publishing houses) etc etc.
But every ounce of it feeds back into the branding, which shifts the miniatures.

So, if a new business opens they have to undercut the price of the GW empire AND overcome decades of massive expenditure in marketing to chip into the market.

Guess what? That's impossible. And even if it were possible, GW would run a three-week lightning sale and the competitor would evaporate under lost sales.

Total War: Warhammer is selling well and for a while Gotrek and Felix was the most profitable part of the WHFB IP.

There are. See Mantic. There are Chinese knock offs of GW figures as well. But as said people like the universe behind figures. It isn't just a figure, it is a part of a setting that people are buying in to.

If you don't like paying that much then play historicals. They are fun, and can be cheap when you pay $25 for 125 15mm German soldiers.

>GW
>Decent sales
Don't fool yourself.

There are knights and spacemen made out of the same stuff as green army men, and you can get toy dragons and tanks and stuff like that to be monsters/vehicles. Maybe make canons out of wood dowels and cardboard.

For some reason, people don't want generic, monopose low detail minis that can't be painted. If they did, you'd probably never know it because the market would be eclipsed by the children's toy market.