Whether you’re all for 3D printing or treat those 3D printing hobbyists around you like they have a scarlet letter, it’s not going to undermine GW.
Jstove is back again to tell us about his experience with 3D printing and lays out the specs on why 3D printing CAN’T undermine GW at its current state. Let’s get into it.
In the Grim Darkness of the Distant Past, There Was Only Rapid Prototyping
In 2008, I was in college for a product design degree, and everything about CAD, 3D, and 3D printing sucked. It sucked to the walls. The 3D printer was the size of a washing machine, and the material was $8 a cubic inch. If you have trouble visualizing that, imagine a pot of Games Workshop paint costing 8 dollars, (not hard) and that’s your 3D printer juice.
The software was even worse. When you merged objects together, it didn’t automatically chop, fit, and hollow the parts. It also didn’t automatically render the object in 3D space unless you were on incredibly sophisticated software, on a very expensive machine. Most of the 3D designs looked like a math textbook. You didn’t look at the finished, rendered model, you looked at dots and lines, at trigonometry.
Back then, 3D printing was only for prototyping. It wasn’t for finished products or making Warhammer models. The idea of any amateur going on Amazon, buying a printer, and setting up an Etsy shop in his garage, was laughable. The technology wasn’t there yet. You needed enough technology to fill a one-bedroom apartment just to make one little piece of crap part out of lousy, chalky resin to take to a Chinese factory to make a real part. 3D printing was basically only for guys like me. The ones who were in school, being taught on $2000 gaming computers with turbo-render graphics cards and workshops full of washing machine-sized printers that were also full of acid. (You had to clean the part in an acid bath after it came out of the printer to disintegrate the scaffolding).
We didn’t call it 3D printing. “3D printing” implied that whatever came out of the printer was somehow complete, like a photograph, or an essay, or things that you’d expect to be done when they come out of a printer. We called it RAPID PROTOTYPING, because a prototype is experimental, crappy, a mock-up, an unfinished ghost of a finished product… Which was what those crappy low rez $8 cubic inch garbage models were.
In the Grim Darkness of the 2020 Present, 3D Printing Actually Works
Everything that is done automatically for you, in your browser, on your piece of junk laptop, on tinkercad, is something I used to have to do manually, on a gaming computer worth more than my car. The technology has come along so far now that I would say that what was probably the most important part of my education is now worthless. What took a whole semester of 3D design classes in 2008 can probably now be boiled down to one month with how accessible and how automated the design software is. The only thing you actually need now is time and talent. Don’t worry though, I’m not mad, because technology is going to do that to every profession except Law, because lawyers are always going to make sure people need them. That’s the number one thing that lawyers do.
3D Printing is going to ruin the hobby worse than knock-off resin and you better go buy a 3D printer and become a miniature counterfeiter because you’re going to be the only guy in the game store that doesn’t have a faked out garage army.
Actually, that’s not true. That’s what in the internet business we call “clickbait” and every time you guys overreact to it, Rob Baer buys his cats another tin of Fancy Feast and we laugh about it. The cats eat well when the facebook analytics look good.
3D printing isn’t some kind of nefarious Soviet cold war plot that’s going to infiltrate your home and turn your neighbors against you and make everyone on your block into fake-army printing IP thief anarchists. There are a few reasons why.
It’s Easy to do, But it’s Still Easy to do Wrong
You can still lose a lot of time and material if you 3D print a model poorly. It’s very easy to design a model now or download a model from the internet. But the 3D printer itself still has to obey the law of physics, and if you don’t set the model and the supports correctly on the print file, you’re going to lose a lot of time and a bit of cash. Building 3D models in a computer now is easy. Getting the model from your computer to your hands is “mostly easy” but that just means that it’s easy unless you screw it up.
This is actually a place where 3D printing loses to resin casting. When you fail at casting, you can still chop a bad mold and throw it into a new mold. Because silicone is recyclable into new silicone. Or repurpose the bad model for terrain or salvage the parts that came out well. Bad 3D prints are much more useless than bad casts.
They Still Take Time, and Time is the Enemy of Knock-Off Artists
Imagine that you know a guy that just bought a 3D printer, and now, like everyone with a 3D printer, he wants to go start a business in his garage printing out knock-off parts for doodads or widgets or cosplay props or Warhammer models or whatever. He’s going to go open up his own Etsy page and start running that printer night and day to fill up his PayPal account.
Well, it’s not that easy. You see, anyone who wants to monetize their new 3D printer has to factor in the time it takes for them to print those parts. That means that making your 3D printer crap out a dozen two-dollar plasma guns for Space Marines is pretty brainless…
But printing out an entire large model or vehicle? That could take 72 hours. And in those 72 hours, the printer isn’t making any money. The harder you work to counterfeit a bigger model, the more cash is going to leak out of the printer. It’s easier to make money on smaller conversion bits that will come off the printer faster.
Is there going to be some guy that prints out an entire Forgeworld Gorgon or Thunderhawk? Yes, there is. I know him personally, he lives 10 minutes up the street from me. But is he going to be standing behind your local GW store like a crack dealer trying to pawn off a trunk of counterfeit Leman Russes and Land Raiders? Nope. He wouldn’t make any money doing it. It still takes too long for the production scale of any at-home garage printer to make any money for a counterfeiter.
Games Workshop knows this, and their design studio takes advantage of it.
So if you’re GW, and you know that the end is coming and that 3D printing technology gets better and better and every year we get closer and closer to being able to make perfect, cheap, plastic clones of toys in our garages, what do you do?
Well, it’s all about the value proposition. GW’s plan is to sell you, the consumer, two kinds of models. Cheap goons, and big badasses.
The cheap goon proposition is simple. You need troops. You need lots of troops. The crappier they are, like cultists and guardsmen, the more of them you need. And GW is willing to give them to you. When you look at the starter boxes over the years for Fantasy, AOS, and 40k, the value proposition gets better and better. They keep cramming more models into the same box and making the deal more and more attractive. The other issue with cheap goons is that the more you need them, the harder they are for the counterfeiter to sell. Nobody actually wants 5 cultists, guardsmen, or termagants. They want 50 of them at a time. Is a counterfeiter going to run his 3D printer for a week just to sell you an army of baby bugs? Not likely. It uses up valuable print time so he probably won’t do it. The enemy of his wallet is print time.
Want to Play 40k? Buy a Starter Box
What’s the next thing you should buy? Another starter box. After that? Probably another starter box. You keep buying starter boxes until you have more marines than you’ll ever need. Because the starter boxes are full of cheap goons, and it doesn’t make sense for you to counterfeit cheap goon models. Because they’re so cheap it doesn’t make any sense to waste time printing them. So would you 3D print cheap goons? Probably not. You’d want to use your 3D printer to make something meatier, more valuable.
Which brings us to big badasses. Giant tanks and monsters, daemon primarchs, dragons, big bugs, greater demons, all that stuff. For Games Workshop, the proposition on big-ticket items is simple. Make the model so big, so cool, so sophisticated and detailed, that no amateur hour garage printer at home will ever be able to replicate the model. Sure, you could probably 3d print a Mortarion knock off if you tried really hard, but with what you’d spend on design, materials, and printing, you probably could have just bought a legit one easier.
If it Doesn’t Make Sense to Print Big Badasses or Goons, What do you Print?
The answer is simple. You print the midline units. The chubby elites that aren’t cheap goons, but they also aren’t gigantic big badass models. Those are the ideal models to print because they’re interesting and strong enough to be worth counterfeiting. But their model count is low enough that printing them isn’t a bad deal for the owner of the printer.
There’s just one little problem…
Most of them suck. This is a happy accident on the part of the game designers. Rest assured, they aren’t doing it intentionally. If Games Workshop knew anything about designing units to drive sales, then the best unit in the game at the end of 8th Edition wouldn’t be a Forgeworld chaplain dreadnought that’s been out of print for years.
The reason that midline elites aren’t good, and therefore aren’t good enough to print, is that their role in the game is minimal. Models like terminators have been on a downward spiral with no end in sight for 5 Editions and the latest changes to the game haven’t helped them out.
There are basically 3 factors in the game that determine the model’s effectiveness. The first is value. How much dumb stuff the model can kill, or how hard it is to kill, for its cost. Big badasses tend to be good at this, or at least they want you to think they’re good at it. (mileage may vary, they may just be big targets.)
The second proposition is real estate. You need to grab up as much of the table as you can because whatever you don’t use to box your opponent in, your opponent will use to box you in. Cheap goons are good for that.
The final factor is synergy. When you go to spend your command points, special abilities, and wombo combos to kill your opponent, you’re going to use them on the units that are going to benefit the most. The unit that benefits the most is usually either a big badass that has the biggest, spiciest gun in your army. Or a giant flock of cheap goons that can drown your opponent in dice with. The guys in the middle of the road? Well, that’s where they are, the middle of the road. Not a lot of units in the game are better than a pile of bodies or one big gun with a lot of shots when it’s time to roll the dice. When it comes to GW and game design, more is always more, and less usually isn’t.
So what’s the value proposition you’re left with? Well, it makes sense to print things like custodians, grey knights, terminators, fancy flashy boys. Except as a general rule, nobody wants them. So it doesn’t make sense to counterfeit them.
So if I can’t print a big badass, goons are too cheap, and nobody wants terminators, what’s the point in having a 3D printer? How can I use it to ruin the entire industry?
3D Printing To Keep Options & Cosmetics Open
We’ve finally arrived at the one thing the 3D printer actually does for you, and that’s options. That’s what it’s for. That’s what makes sense to print. Do you want custom chapter shoulderpads? You want plasma guns? You want to print out a new arm for your giant robot that has a cool claw on it? That’s when it makes sense to 3D print. Also, as a general rule, printing accessories and conversion bits isn’t exactly a counterfeit issue. You’re not looking at an entire space marine. You’re looking at a stock space marine with some new gadget or doodad glued to him. That’s not exactly a massive threat to your hobby or someone undercutting the business of your favorite game store.
Are there professionals with powerful computers, high tech software, massive production capability, and the talent to create badass models? Yes, there are. But nobody with any talent or access to production is going to use those assets to make perfect counterfeit knockoff Thunderhawks. They’re going to use it to create their own business. The guy in his garage with his $200 printer and his first weekend on Thingiverse? Yeah, I’m not worried about his garage Thunderhawk. He’s not gonna start flipping those overnight and putting Forgeworld out of business.
What do you think about how far 3D printing has come? Do you know anybody that bought a 3D printer to sell on the secondary market?