FW questions

[GreenScorpion]

18 hours ago, Closet Skeleton said:

3d printing will have completely replaced any form of moulded prototyping.

Basically its a artificial scarcity issue. Its easier to cost a product when you know it will sell out. I doubt they're that profitable though.

There are still many companies doing models from traditionally sculpted miniatures. Resin prototypes are often used for those (even if the final product is metal for example) but 3d printing is not an option for those (scanning the model and later printing would be way more expensive and less representative of the final product).
For digitally sculpted miniatures even GW uses 3d printing, but I was making a general observation not specifically what GW/FW do as a business plan.

In what relates to plastic characters, they should be extremely profitable for GW, even if they used the more expensive moulds and didn't produce until the mould breaks.
A steel mould is typically significantly larger than a single character sprue. Most moulds would have easily 4, 6 or even 8 characters.
If you make several limited run characters from the same physical mould (different smaller sprues but same steel mould) and sell each miniature above 35€, you make a lot of money even with like 50k of each limited character.
Example, with each character being sold at 40€ and 4 characters in the same mould, if you sold 50k of each, you got 8 million euros out of a single mould.
Even if you reduce it to something like 20k, it is 3,2 million euros in sales.
Most space marine characters are more expensive than 40€, so you can imagine how profitable these could be, especially if they all sell out and there is no waste in the end beyond a mould that could be reused for made to order in the future.