Re: [Epic] what's in the new boxes ?

From: Mark A Shieh <SHODAN+_at_...>
Date: Mon, 10 Nov 1997 12:44:22 -0500 (EST)

"Miller, Chris" <CMiller_at_...> writes:
> >> That's right, you get 1 sprue of whatever, where as the previous boxes, =
> >> you got 5 sprues for just a bit more. Something seems wring here to me.
> >> Cyril Crocker
> >> Dragon Slayer
> >> dslayer_at_...
> >
> > While GW prices are high, they aren't *this* bad (yet). It's
> >1 sprue, but it is twice as big. And 50% is more than just a bit
> >more, IMHO...
> >
> >Before: After:
> >5 sprues for $15 2 sprues worth for $10
> >
> >So it's only a 66% markup, not a 5x markup. Besides, the Eldar
> >Warhost comes with these 5 NEAT NEW WARP SPIDERS!!! AND 2 NEW
> >PSYKERS!!! AND A 35 NEW GUARDIANS!!!! THAT'S 42 NEW MODELS FOR ONLY
> >$10!
>
> -----> Actually I remember when it was 10 sprues for 10$ (later $12.50)
> and 20 sprues for
> 20$, so the "before price" was 3 times the cost and the current one is 5
> times the price,
> and this was not THAT long ago (up til 1991-2).

Me too, but I'm was thinking of the latest markup, not the total
markup over the years.

> Am I paying 5 times as much for movie tickets?

        There used to be $1 second run, mom+pop movie theaters a while
back. They've all gone the way of the 21 movie-mega-super-theaters.
So prices have gone up 5x. Just not quite as quickly, and it's just
as much the fault of the consumer in this case.

> Computer Games ?

        You're paying for over 5x the man-hours though. In the old
days, computer games were written by one person and cranked out in
under a year. Today's games are much flashier and more complicated,
and this doesn't necessarily make them better, but you are buying more
work. They hire artists now too, which helps. :) Coders usually have
better things to do than try to draw icons.

> Books?

When I was little (I forget how little, unfortunately), paperbacks
were a dollar or two. Before that, they were a quarter or less,
though the timeline is really fuzzy to me. The prices stopped going
up rapidly a few years ago, but for a while, they were going up pretty
quickly. Paper was undervalued for a long time. I don't think this
is as much the case with the plastic, but it could be true to a
certain extent. At any rate, I definitely used to pay less for
paperbacks, and my parents may have spent 1/30 of what the cost now
when they bought them 20-30 years ago. It's fun digging through the
collection, anyway.

> (who seems to remember that the whole point of the plastic minis was
> that they were "less expensive to make, enabling players to collect
> sizeable armies" etc etc. Wonder where that concept went?)

        Dunno. While they're sure going up *faster* than anything
else I can think of off the top of my head, it's not like everything
else has been standing still too. I'm starting to reach the point,
happily, that I'm beginning to trade for minis more than buy them.
Ditched some Battlemasters Chaos for Megagargants and Titan weapons
recently. I've always wanted a Corvus Assault Head. :)
        But plastic hasn't appealed to me for a while, though I'm
always a sucker for box sets. (stuff like the E40k box, not the
Tyranid Swarm box)

Mark
Received on Mon Nov 10 1997 - 17:44:22 UTC