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

From: Miller, Chris <CMiller_at_...>
Date: Mon, 10 Nov 1997 15:03:34 -0600

>> 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.

------.> Down here(Dallas) the $1 movies are $1.50 now. First runs used
to be 5$,say 10 years ago (high school) and now they're 6$-6.75. 30-50%
increase.
>
>> 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.

------> Yes, but the point is they don't cost 150$. New, they are still
typically $50-something, where they've been for a few years. If they
take more time, workers, etc now, but cost roughly the same, yet people
still work in the industry, I assume they're still making money.
>
>> 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.

------> Oh yeah, paperbacks are just insane now. I remember buying the
Lord of the Rings, and the books were $1.95 apiece. Now a comparably
sized paperback goes for about $5 if not 6. I've become a big customer
of "Half-Price Books", a local chain that's pretty decent. I rarely buy
anything in the new stores anymore.
>
>> (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

-------> Well, it's not like Legoland's been under an embargo and the
threat of instability in the whole Styrene Gulf has been driving prices
up in the world plastic market. : )
        I'm trying to build greenskins in both 40K and WHFB so I've recently
gotten into plastic in a big way and the figures used to be 10 to a box
for $10. Then they went to $12.50. Then they went to 8 figures per box
(5 for most 40K units) at the same price. It's this "creeping" that
annoys me. Having the 10-man box at home next to the 5-man box of the
same figures and realizing I paid the same price for both within 2 years
or less just chafes. And considering that the majority of any epic army
(which I have played the most over the last few years)is in the plastic
sets, it chafes a little more.

Chris Miller
Received on Mon Nov 10 1997 - 21:03:34 UTC