Tuesday, May 4, 2010

Wargames Factory FTW!




WARGAMES FACTORY INTRODUCES:
THE LIBERTY AND UNION LEAGUE
WHERE YOU DECIDE WHAT WE MAKE...
...AND HAVE A CHANCE FOR FAME AND FORTUNE!



Ok I'm sure almost everyone out there knows about Wargames Factory they have burst onto the scene with some amazingly well done and astoundingly cheap (seriously how the hell do they make their stuff so damn cheap ...?!?!) plastic 28 MM minis. The reason I'm posting this is I don't think people are really fully aware of how cool this company is. Let me elaborate on the Liberty and Union League ... in short it is BRILLIANT! 

I'm just going to put the entire page in right here ... its a damn cool idea ... and people they have been following through on this. Do you guys play GW games ... want something compatible with those? Do you play D&D or RPGs and think a certain fig ... cheap ... by the hordes ... would be cool? Go to their page and suggest something be produced. Let me know if you do .. if its something decent ... I'm in for 10 sprues ... whether or not anyone wants to suggest things I just really like this idea. This is a company that is basically ready and willing to make whatever their customers will buy ... literally ... sadly a novel concept these days. Asking your customers directly ... vs ... asking your marketing department/focus groups/etc. 



SUBMIT YOUR IDEAS, SEE THEM MADE INTO HARD PLASTIC, AND WIN BIG!

This is an idea that our good friend Nic Robson of Eureka Miniatures first came up with. Let’s say you want a figure, or a bunch of figures, that nobody makes. Nic lets you submit your suggestion to the Eureka Miniatures website and lets everyone vote on it. Once enough people have said they were interested and have pre-ordered enough miniatures, Eureka puts them into production and offers them for sale. How’s that for customer service!
The big difference between Wargames Factory and Eureka Miniatures is that we’re doing our figures in hard plastic (by the sprue) and the start-up costs to produce the injection mold tooling for a small set of figures is VERY high so you need to sell “farsands” of them!
But the numbers aren’t as huge as you may have been led to believe! If we can get a hundred people to promise, between them, to buy a thousand sprues (averaging 10 sprues each) of any given subject, then we are in business! That’s not to say that selling 1000 sprues will cover all of our costs, but the combination of 100 unique purchasers and 1000 total sprues sold tells us that there is enough interest in that sprue that it will most likely do well once it reaches the wider wargames market and we’ll be able to at least break even!
(On the flip side, one guy who wants 1000 sprues for himself is great – but we would have to wonder if there are any more like him in the world and whether or not we would ever inject plastic into that very expensive mold again after the first 1000 sprues were shipped off to the Collector extraordinaire?! That said, we want to make people happy and we want to make figures that people love – so if you have a project you would really, really like to see done but that doesn’t necessarily have a huge mass market appeal – let us know!)
“What’s the catch?”  we hear you ask… There is none! That’s what’s great about this. You make your suggestions, we put them up on the site, those who agree with you vote with a free “order”, and once the number of customers and “orders” reaches 100 and 1000 respectively, we make the sprue! Once we start production, we will show work-in-progress shots of the miniatures, elicit your feedback and make changes, and then go into tooling. Prior to going into production, we’ll contact all those who made “orders” to finalize and ship the sprues to you – you don’t pay anything until the sprues are being made. It’s pretty simple actually.

Hey, What's With the Fame and Fortune Part?
That's the FUN part! If you enter a sprue suggestion, and your suggestion makes it to the 1000-sprue level and gets made into plastic -- you
will WIN:

10 FREE Sprues of Your Idea
A $100 Wargames Factory Gift Certificate
and last, but not least:
The Undying Adoration of Fellow Wargamers!

I'm Sold! What Do I Do Now?

It depends, here are your choices:

1. Submit your own idea -- by going HERE.

2. "Shop" other people's ideas -- by going HERE.

3. Read the "How To" in more depth HERE.

4. See what's on the Hit, Bullet, and Bucket lists by clicking HERE.

or

5. Be completely overwhelmed by the sheer number of possibilities, be completely unable to make up your mind, totally freak out, and buy 87 books HERE to try to help you decide on a submission!

Whatever you decide...PLEASE ENJOY!

2 comments:

Will said...

Wow I have not heard of this yet...I will have to ponder on what I think would sell 1000 sprues :)

The Lord of Excess said...

I committed to buy various suggestions by others. 5 sprues of this and that ... 20 skeletons and robed cultists ... I mean come on who could ever have enough robed cultist and skeleton figures??