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Which I suppose tells a lot about where the cost of production lies.
Yeah, big time. Metal production costs have always had labor as a proportionally large contributor simply because it is not a very automatable, and therefore not a very scaleable, process.
Additionally now the cost of metal has doubled (more than doubled?) in the last ~18 months.
Meanwhile plastic production costs (which are also going up) seem more practical than in the past.
I think the price similarity tells us that the labour involved with metal casting is similar regardless of scale – the bulk of the cost is in the people time not the quantity of metal.
Sir Able is entirely correct here. I’m not sure why there is dispute. Just ask anyone who works in casting miniatures, or works with those who cast miniatures – I’m in that second group, my company has worked with other companies who manufacture miniatures either as their primary direct-to-gamer business (like AB and Perry do) as well as companies that manufacture miniatures as OEMs for other businesses.
The primary cost driver for metal miniatures has historically always been the labor required. We might think that since a 15-18mm figure is X amount smaller than a 25-28mm figure, and therefore uses less material and takes up less space in the mold, it should cost something like X less. But that’s not actually true.
1) Labor is your primary cost driver, material costs are a kicker and not generally the root cause of pricing. This means that while lowering the cost of material can have an impact on overall cost, it will have a reduced impact related to its proportionality to the overall costs. If the labor to produce something is $1 and the material to produce it is 20¢, then material costs dropping to 5¢ (75% reduction in material costs) will still only have a maximum impact of about 12.5%. Sure, 12% is 12%, but is sure as heck is basically nothing compared to the 75% reduction it took to accomplish that 12%.
2) Metal molds are more labor than they are not labor. Everything about a mold relates more to labor than anything else. The cost to make a mold? Overwhelming labor. The cost to spin a mold? Overwhelmingly labor. Increasing mold capacity – perhaps by casting smaller miniatures – should help, because it means I can fit more in, therefore buy less molds (maybe, but not really*), and I can spin it less times. Woohoo! Except: due to how metal molds work there is innately “lost space” in them. Metal flows out from the center towards the outside edge. Reducing the height of a miniature doesn’t really give me more mold capacity. Reducing the bulk/width of the miniature does… but the net result is that while shrinking a miniature from 25-28mm to 15-18mm reduces the volume of the model in multiple dimensions, my mold capacity doesn’t gain in all of those dimensions, only some of them. Therefore, there’s a benefit, but it isn’t as great as one might want it to be or think that it is. This means that the molds required (labor) doesn’t change that much and the number of spins required (labor) doesn’t change that much.
3) Smaller can actually require more labor not less. As OotKust noted, if I have one large model in a mold and you have five small models in a mold, it may not take 5x as much time for you to de-mold the five smaller figures, but it will take more than 1x. The net result is that the minimal labor gains we might have scored by dropping to a smaller scale are getting eaten pretty fast.
*This really isn’t true either because product package configuration combined with spin yield is the ultimate driver of the number of both the number of molds required and the spins required.Since generally gamers expect and buy smaller scale miniatures in higher volume than larger scale miniatures the labor per package can easily end up being more similar than you might want it to be or think that it is.
All of this really comes down to metal casting being a labor intensive, un-automated process, which over the last 18-24 months has been additionally hit by rising material costs, which, while not the primary cost driver, certainly have been piling on.
Meanwhile, the primary cost driver for plastic has historically been startup costs, i.e. tooling. Overall, traditional hard plastic (HIPS) manufacturing is a good choice if you are doing relatively high volume, whereas metal was a good entry-level solution because of low startup costs. The problem is that metal didn’t and still does not scale. Selling you 1,000 of something will generally cost the manufacture the same per figure as selling you 100 of it. Conversely, selling you 1,000 of a plastic item has a radically higher profit margin and lower costs than selling you 100 of that same thing. This is changing some with newly available short-run plastic technologies, but that’s another discussion.
Now, with additional pressure on labor, combined with rising metal material costs, the issue for metal manufacturers ends up being: Will customers continue to pay what is necessary for manufacturers to remain profitable? Hard to say. I suspect in 5-10 years we’re going to see a lot less metal manufacturing going on unless current trends change radically.
Hope this helps.
But WTF does TWW logout users -a week? It takes me that long to unpadlock the bloody safe!
Every 2 weeks, it is a security feature that the software uses.
I know some other sites are less fussy about such things, no SSL, no ability to delete your personal data or posts and so on, not here though.
Whilst far from perfect, I do try to stay on the right side of legislation and keep TWW as safe and secure as I can.
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