"Enough interest to convince Hasbro to mass produce D&D figs?" Topic

NOTE: this topic is not aimed at people who enjoy painting figures… Move along, nothing to see, here. ;-) My target audience are RPG'ers, and those who want mass battles, without a lot of painting required.

Played D&D this weekend, and we used several D&D vinyl pre-paints in the game (2nd Ed. AD&D, not 4th…). It really made me lament Hasbro's/WotC's decision to produce such a limited amount of their pre-painted, vinyl figures. They are not that bad, for quality, and they seemed to sell a great many of them. Their resale on e-Bay seems to be quite successful, as well.

I've purchased handful's of them, over the years, for different units for my 2nd Ed. BattleSystem games, and I would pick up more box-full's of them, if I could get them at an affordable, reasonable, price, to create units for my mass battle games, as well as my RPG games. Sadly, neither company was willing to produce non-random sets. The volume of common figures they would sell, would be quite high: Goblins, Orcs, Skeletons, etc. Yet, they never bothered.

Is there enough interest out there, to lobby Hasbro/WotC to consider marketing the figures already produced (to minimize production costs, and take advantage of what they already have invested in these lines)? Considering all of the various sets they produced over the life of the D&D mini's game, there are several different poses of many figure types, which makes them more attractive for both the RPG crowd, and the mini's gamers. Those who are interested, please sound off. Cheers!

Is there enough interest out there, to lobby Hasbro/WotC to consider marketing the figures already produced (to minimize production costs, and take advantage of what they already have invested in these lines)?

No.

They've done all they wanted to do with the line and are done. People made the requests for boxed sets, etc over the past several years.

That train has sailed.

Speaking out of my hat here, but I suspect that part of the reason is that Hasbro has both a much higher definition of "mass market" than you or I might, and a correspondingly higher standard for return on cost than you or I might expect. A smaller gaming company would consider sales in the tens of thousands to be a fantastic success; to Hasbro, that level of sales is an unmitigated failure. When they have products that reach sales in the hundreds of thousands or even millions range, why would they put their money and production efforts into anything that won't reach that status? It's not worth it to them, in no small part because it's not worth the cost or inefficiency of putting their staff to work on it. Consider it this way: Bob in Marketing is paid (in salary and benefits) $65,000 USD yearly by Hasbro. He can be assigned to selling a line of games based on Barbie that will easily bring in sales of over one million products for a yearly profit to Hasbro of $1.25 USD mill (numbers pulled out of a hat). Or he can be assigned to market a line of plastic pre-painted orcs for D&D that will reach yearly sales of ten thousand products and a return of $125,000 USD per year. No brainer— the return on cost of Bob's efforts is an order of magnitude (or possibly even more) for the Barbie line; Barbie slaughters the orcs.
So the sales potential on D&D prepaints simply isn't there for Hasbro's level of expected return.

Now, what might be possible is if a dedicated figure manufacturer could work out a license with Hasbro to use the "D&D" logo for the product you describe. But even then, the license would have to promise enough return for Hasbro to be willing to assign its legal department to work out the deal— and again, I'm guessing this would need to be in the $100 USDk+ per year level, which I doubt it would be.

I'm reminded of a local incident where a group met with the head of Opryland/Gaylord (owners of the Opryland Hotel) to propose a joint project. The group had calculated yearly profits in the $100 USDk range. But when they revealed this, the Opryland CEO interrupted. "Gentlemen, last year we made ten million dollars on parking. Come back to me when you have something which can top that." End of presentation, end of project.

Somethings are just a whole different league.

For some recent thoughts on the dollars and cents side of the equation read this timely blog post:

link

What Pazival said. Do some searching for interviews of former Hasbro/ WoTC employees about the development of 4th and 5th edition for an idea of what the desired sales figures are for the D&D line and it will give you a good understanding of what directions Hasbro will go with the line.

According to several store owners in my city, just about every buyer said the same thing – we want sets of monsters e.g. bugbears, orcs, knolls etc. The random box contents of D&D miniatures turned buyers away.

The random box contents of D&D miniatures turned buyers away.

And attracted a lot more. The DDM line did well for them, which is why it lasted several years and several iterations.

Wargamers are a niche within a niche, believe me.

And that's an awesome example with Gaylord, Parzival.

Random is bad, but speaking as a DM (non-practicing) it was the fact that they were random packs of monsters *and* heroes that kept me from buying anything but singles. Keep them separate, keep the random packs of monsters if you want, but sell the "heroes" as non-blind singles or sets. (or not at all, most of those adventurer sculpts were… less then good)

Players don't want monsters and DMs (mostly) don't want more heroes.

I love painted metal, but I think prepainted minis are a very good idea.

The problem with WotC's random packs was: it was only half of the actual product.

The missing half was a card – with a code on it – that allowed you to go to WotC's online shop and order more of the minis included in your pack…

If you buy a pack with a gnoll, you could go to the store and order 10 more, etc.

WotC cheated themselves out of a lot of cash by not having a distribution channel where people could order quantities that were made available to them via a random pack. It would have been great to be able to order a custom pack, but fulfillment of that might've been a really expensive problem to solve.

My primary complaint with WotC's random packs, though, was the overuse of packaging materials… way too much plastic bags and clear shell packaging. That had to drive up the overhead.

To address the original question: what's proposed by WotC in its Dungeon Command line looks to be a possibility. If they price their board/mini games carefully, it could be a way for them to get back into that part of the business.

There is still the Legendary Encounters by Reaper that are pre-painted. About the same scale, not nearly as many to choose from but an option:

link

At GenCon2011, WotC announced they WILL be putting out a new line of non-random prepainted themed sets of miniatures. I think the first sets are supposed to come out during summer 2012.

Here's a quote from WotC: "the big product announcement I alluded to earlier was this: the return of miniatures produced by Wizards of the Coast… and this time, no random packaging. For all those gamers who said things like "I just want to be able to buy a box of orcs for my game," this is for you.

Wizards will be releasing themed boxes of miniatures (like orcs, drow, goblins, elves, etc.) with non-random contents, providing a variety of miniatures in each box. Not only that, but the minis will be useable in a new skirmish game to be developed around the new minis. Each box will contain the stats you need to play with the box you buy, and interlocking terrain used to build the battlefield in interesting ways for each match (that is also fully useable in the RPG.) Additionally, after a few sets are out, you'll be able to mix and match them in order to build your own armies, not being constrained by what you buy in each box.

The new miniatures skirmish game is notable in two aspects: first, it won't use any dice. It is designed to be more strategic and less reliant on luck (though there will still be some) and is powered by some kind of action card system. Second, the skirmish game itself will be built on a completely open mass playtest that will appear on the D&D website starting in September. That way, the game will get plenty of testing and come out the best it can be."

Fantastic news! I don't care for the sounds of the game itself, but the figures will be wonderful, if the price-point is good enough (read: inexpensive sets of figures). I certainly hope they issue plenty of monsters, as well as the standard, "buy 'em by the box-full" troop types (Elves, Orcs, Goblins, etc.). Dragon figures would be big sellers, if they don't ask you to fork over an arm, leg, or your first-born, for them. ;-)

Like I said, most of the molds are done, they just need to produce sets of figures. The standard army troop race types should sell very well, which I hope will sustain the line for the monster types, which won't sell as 'units', but rather for the RPG crowds usage. Thanks for the heads up. Looking forward to seeing this come to fruition. Cheers!

Here is more information from other sites regarding WotC's new themed sets of pre-painted miniatures.
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Amazon.com lists three Dungeon Command sets at $26.39 USD for pre-order. In July, 2012, the "Heart of Cormyr" and "Sting of Lolth" sets will be released, and in August, 2012, the "Tyranny of Goblins" set will be released.
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Dungeon Command will be released in July of 2012. There will be two sets released; The Heart of Cormyr and Sting of Lolth. The format will be 12 pre-painted plastic miniatures in each set, with cards, interlocking tiles and rules to play the game. You will be able to open one box and play, or combine the two sets and pit the two factions against each other. Apparently the cards will also allow them to be compatible with the D&D board games.
At D&D Experience it was revealed that the sets would consist of some new sculpts and repaints of sculpts from previous sets. I can already think of some of the best sculpts available that would be great as repaints for the Sting of Lolth set. There are some really great Drow miniatures out there and I really think that with the Menzoberranzan: City of Intrigue campaign book being released for Neverwinter in August, WotC finally got the timing perfect on miniature products releases. This will likely be a huge seller for them. Depending on the variety of the types of Drow, I could see myself buying two packs of these to use for an upcoming Adventure that I would like to run for 4E.
Heart of Cormyr will be 12 various Ranger, Rogue, Knight, Defender, and Warrior miniatures. I would love to see a pack of mixed races of sculpts. The Heart of Cormyr pack has the potential to sell well if WotC is smart enough to include a good variety of Humans, Elves, Dwarves, Dragonborn and hopefully some other races. This set has potential to be a great way for a new player to the game to pick up a good variety of PC miniatures. I may not pick up two of these packs, but if it looks good, I would probably pick up at least one.
One more thing of note from D&D Experience. It was revealed that a third pack may follow the Heart of Cormyr and Sting of Lolth sets. The third set is rumored to be Goblins.
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- The game is called Dungeon Command.
- It comes in fixed content, themed, boxed sets (a "heroes"-themed box and a Drow themed box are the 1st ones to come out).
- 12 (if I remember correctly) pre-painted figures.
- Some figures are just repaints, some are re-purposed. I don't remember if they said there are any new ones in there at all, although they definitely didn't rule out the possibility of adding new scuplts in the future.
- $40 USD/box, though the game can be played with only 1 box. (A little spendy, I know)
- Comes with monster cards compatible with the D&D Adventure system games (Castle Ravenloft, Wrath of Ashardalon, Legend of Drizzt)
- A worldwide gameday will take place to celebrate the release.
- Tournament floor rules are being written by Chris Tulach, WotC's head of organized play (and all around nice guy)
- No plans are in place to add a ranking/ELO system.
- Major tournament will be held @ GenCon 2012.

Thats certainly interesting news. I own a few pre paints, for RPGing, though occasionally they get to wargames too.

The points may be various posters are all valid. However there are a lot of RPG players out there. And lots of younger kids getting into the market. So will be interesting to see how it pans out.

IF the pricing v quality balance is correct. I think they will sell well.

It looks like things are happening with the prepainted miniatures. For a long time I have seen a need for rank and file basic creatures for the game. The only real problem I see here is the question of how much are they going to cost. Will it be worth the cost to buy them or am I better off painting my own?

Not enough interest to produce them apparently.

I think the box sets are going to be a 'limited run'.

Still, I hope they get around to making moar oozes!