With shipments out till may and different places being locked down, any thoughts about selling 3d printable minis? Or where there 3d printing side of sales is headding?
The terrain is awesome. I mean $15 for the APC was a bit high, but $7.51 for the Corvega felt like an acceptable price. And the vault terrain packs are well priced. When I look at those, my reaction is one of “yeah, that’s worth that price.”
I’d just like to see other things to print and paint. Terrain is cool, but my in-person gaming is dead until…let’s be honest, here in the States things will be iffy until a vaccine is finally approved and in production. So I’m more interested in fun things to print and paint right now.
Yeah, I’ve been wondering about the same thing and whether 3d printing will either ruin or revolutionize the tabletop gaming industry.
Once 3d printers become more and more common, it will become more common to print minis instead of buying them. No need to buy multiple boxes of something anymore. And then there’s piracy.
I really wish for a software that allows us to design our own minis, like Hero Forge, but with Fallout Minis of course.
Piracy’s always been an issue in gaming.
The reason why so many 1st ed D&D maps are printed in blue was because they were worried that copiers would be used to pirate the books. That changed over the years as it turned out that people would still rather own the hard copy of a book than a xeroxed copy.
PDFs are similar problem now, but some publishers are leaning into it realizing that it’s a way to sell books without incurring printing costs.
Minis are going to go the same way.
I could get a small mold making rubber kit for $15 and a resin kit for $20 and make a bunch of knock off space marines or etc.
Or, I could use a HD camera and meshroom to scan in minis and turn then into 3d printable objects. Or dump a few hundred into a good 3d scanner and get really good resolution minis.
Right now the quality on printing is not perfect unless you’re using resin, though it seems like most are using FDM printers. Even then, resin printing can produce some great results.
I guess my point is that the genie’s kinda out of the bottle already and it’s not going away.
The best option might be for producers to take that into account, shift to printable products and try to move with the times.
Though that does seem to be part of what Modiphius is doing with the 3d printable terrain. So that puts this company ahead of the curve right now.
What I’d do if I was in the industry though (and I’m working on assumptions based on my own ignorance of the industry)
I’d produce 2 lines of products. The first would be the traditional plastic/pewter minis. I’d call them my “Professional” line and brand them as being high quality castings with finer detail than you can print. The second would be a printable line of the same models.
The tricky part would be finding a way to incentive people to buy the physical product without sabotaging the digital product via overpricing or such.
Not everyone has a 3d printer though so there’s be demand for the “pro” line. With the rules books available as a PDF, suddenly a much larger pool of players can buy and play the product regardless of physical availability.
I’ll be honest, its easier said than done. And that’s from someone with no money invested in a company right now. I’d be a hell of a lot more cautious if it was my company on the line.
I JUST got a 3d printer this last week, set it all up last night and am itching to start my first print right now.
For me, I suspect that miniatures is going to account for 90% of everything I print. That said, I understand the value of the companies that create these kinds of game. I love having a proper hard copy of cards and miniatures. If they release things in physical form, I’ll still buy them. Additionally, if I have the choice between an official 3d model and one someone else makes, then I’d much prefer the official model just on principal.
For me, one of the biggest hurdles in any hobby is the pricing. I suspect that’s true for many players. Pricing keeps a lot of people out of hobbies like this, or at least minimizes how deeply they delve into these hobbies.
If they were to release all of their models in a 3d printable format, I’d likely go that rout with a lot of models, but would still buy the physical copes of cards and box sets that might include any physical items like maps or tokens.
I do really like some of the 3d content they’ve been releasing. I’m going to be printing off some of the vehicles they’ve released, the new shelving and such. Heck, with the new floor pack, I’m considering jumping into their vault line as well (Was going to go with a knockoff brand, but assuming the floors are done so multi layer vaults are possible, then I’ll probably go ahead and do the official stuff since I can now print them myself.
3d printing also offers a wide range of custom terrain and such online that will help diversify a table, which is a big part of what I want it for, to be able to print little tidbits that we’ll almost certainly never see official scatter for.
Granted, I haven’t printed anything yet, so my thoughts on the subject may change drastically with experience.
For good quality mini prints, if your using a FDM printer (filament via a hotend), check out the youtube channel Tomb of 3d Printed Horrors. The guy there, Tom, is the goto expert on printing minis these days and he has an amazing cura profile over on the site for his company, Fat Dragon Games.
If I was going to print any of these minis on an FDM printer, I’d use THAT profile for the best effect.
