How has the miniatures business been doing, post-pandemic?

[payn]

Battletech is very popular in the twin cities. Both Alpha Strike (modern miniatures version of Battletech) and classic. Catalyst ran a few successful KS since the pandemic. I think it was tight there for a few years but folks have really gotten out again to play.

X-wing was really popular here, but seems to be wanning. Warhammer continues to have a steady presence.

I dont have any sales figures for you though. I bet D&D minis is probably down, but miniatures games seem to be on a rebound.

 

[Clint_L]

I don't have hard data for anything, but Games Workshop appears to be doing well. When it comes to miniatures, I kind of feel like it's Games Workshop and then everyone else.

I think this is true, but with an asterix. GW is the biggest name, by far, but only for their own stuff. They're pretty irrelevant outside of that ecosystem - if you're collecting miniatures for D&D, for example, you don't have that much use for GW.

Although I used to play a ton of Fantasy Battle (wood elves and undead, in particular), as well as Blood Bowl, 40k, Space Hulk, etc., ever since I stopped I don't even think about GW miniatures, aside from the occasional piece of terrain, and some of their paints. Their style is very much their style.

 

[MGibster]

I think this is true, but with an asterix. GW is the biggest name, by far, but only for their own stuff. They're pretty irrelevant outside of that ecosystem - if you're collecting miniatures for D&D, for example, you don't have that much use for GW.

I don't see why an asterix is necessary. Or an Obelix even. The OP asked about miniatures companies in general and GW certainly qualifies. I'm not even sure if you're right that people who collect miniatures for D&D have no interest in anything produced by GW. They cut their teeth on fantasy miniatures for games like D&D back in the 1980s and they've continued to produce fantasy miniatures for nearly forty years at this point. And while GW charges quite a bit for their miniatures, in the past at least, if you wanted a mob of orcs, goblins, or skeletons they sold boxed sets of 10-20 that were a pretty good deal.

GW is a weird company, I'll grant you. According to their own market research (allegedly) from 2015, only about 20% of their customers who purchased models were gamers. Most people who bought their models weren't playing GW games they were just painting and displaying their models. I might have scoffed at this at one time but in these last few years I've come around to thinking it might be accurate. People don't play Warhammer because they love the rules, and I spend a hell of a lot more time painting and modeling than I will ever spend playing. I've come to think of Warhammer games as pageants for my painted models.

 

[FitzTheRuke]

My anecdotal but professional experience says that miniatures are doing fine. Prepainted minis are down from pre-pandemic days, but that was always likely to happen (the prices keep going up, there is more and more competition, etc).

But unpainted minis are doing quite well. They are down from pandemic highs - there was a bit there when, yes, as the OP says, everyone was forced online, but they could and DID paint minis. During that time, the prepainted ones died off almost entirely, but they still sell, just not like they used to. But I would say that the unpainted ones are still above what they were pre-pandemic.

It's true that a lot more people play RPGs online than ever did before, but that hasn't particularly shrunk the market for F2F product and play.

Think of it this way - a lot of people may have moved online, but even more people started playing. Most of those probably play (or at least, started playing online) but enough of them also play F2F, so the F2F market hasn't really shrunk, even while the online market has grown.

That's my experience, anyway.

 

[Wofano Wotanto]

Battletech is very popular in the twin cities. Both Alpha Strike (modern miniatures version of Battletech) and classic. Catalyst ran a few successful KS since the pandemic. I think it was tight there for a few years but folks have really gotten out again to play.

I probably should have mentioned that IP as well, they've certainly seen a major resurgence in the last few years and I'd credit a lot of that to the vastly improved and much more economical plastic sculpts that are available these days. Some very successful e-games have helped a lot too, and of course Alpha Strike has given people a whole new excuse for buying way more minis that you could ever use at once in classic BT (not that that seemed to hinder over-purchasing much in the past) but really, I think the minis deserve most of the credit. Choosing to base them off the designs from the online game instead of trying to tweak the originals yet again has paid off big.

BT fan though I am (been playing on and off since it was Battledroids, after all) I have to admit this is the first time I've ever been really happy with the minis as minis, rather than just as playing pieces. Ral Partha certainly tried hard to meet demand (and Iron Wind continues to do so, so someone's still buying them) but even their newest sculpts are saddled with a lot of really quite ugly line art as a basis, and rising metal prices have made their prices just exorbitant. With many of them also being multi-part metal they also lack the durability of plastics, and that's something you really in a system with such short ranges and prevalent melee combat. Your minis are going to bump each other sometimes, and plastics handle that better than metal.

The incredibly deep lore (easily on par with anything GW does, or even big RPG settings like Forgotten Realms) for the IP probably helps too. Even the diehard grumblers in the fan base can find some era they enjoy playing in, and they've expanded the lesser factions quite a lot over the years to make for more variety than the original Five houses model allowed for.

 

[el-remmen]

With nothing but anecdotal data to go from based on the community of mini painters and terrain makers I am a part of on Instagram, minis and terrain seem to be doing fine though ironically probably some drop off post pandemic.

 

[Clint_L]

I don't see why an asterix is necessary. Or an Obelix even. The OP asked about miniatures companies in general and GW certainly qualifies. I'm not even sure if you're right that people who collect miniatures for D&D have no interest in anything produced by GW. They cut their teeth on fantasy miniatures for games like D&D back in the 1980s and they've continued to produce fantasy miniatures for nearly forty years at this point. And while GW charges quite a bit for their miniatures, in the past at least, if you wanted a mob of orcs, goblins, or skeletons they sold boxed sets of 10-20 that were a pretty good deal.

I've been pretty active on miniatures discussion boards for many years. Games Workshop is its own thing - either you collect them or you don't. There is virtually no discussion of them on minisgallery, for example. I know it skews heavily towards Wizkids, but you can find ongoing discussions of Reaper, Steamforged, and so on. That's why in my first post I described them as their own ecosystem. They're very successful but pretty irrelevant if you are collecting for D&D, Pathfinder, etc.

I'm unusual in that I do incorporate GW miniatures into my collection - holdovers from fantasy battles that still work. But not a lot of them. Most GW workshops very much have that signature style, a kind of Heavy Metal magazine interpretation of fantasy that looks odd with more conventional miniatures. I would say maybe 5% of my current collection that I use is from GW, and I'm an outlier. I have boxes of them packed up that I don't want to part with - I could still easily put together a 5000 point wood elf army using the late 90s rules. Actually, this is making me think that I should go through them again and try to add a few more.

That's why I think GW is an asterix If you're asking about how miniatures are doing post-pandemic. They're doing about the same as always. I assumed the question was more about everyone else.

 

[humble minion]

Probably the hardest hit major company was Privateer Press, whose focus on tourney gaming wound up hurting them pretty badly when there were no tourneys - something that theoretically should also have crippled GW but as it turns out they apparently have a larger percentage of casual players than PP did.

I can't speak for the tourney scene one way or another, but PP have had a load more problems than purely pandemic-related in recent years. First and foremost, of course, was GW undergoing a major management change and starting doing things like 'communicating with customers' and 'not making players wait for decades between codex upgrades' etc etc, and all this was happening at the same time as the shift to an all-plastic line and the resultant skyrocketing in miniature quality. PP was often the game company for disgruntled ex-GW players, and there's just a lot fewer of that demographic than there used to be.

But PP have had other problems, too. Long-term supply chain issues. There was at least one major rules revision that went down like a lead balloon. There was their long-term problem in attracting new casual or narrative-oriented players to a game tat wat optimised around highly competitive tourney gaming. And they've made an absolute dogs breakfast of the story-telling. They basically blew up the Iron Kingdoms to launch a brand new sci-fi spin-off, which landed like a cowpat and has had vanishingly little support since its release. They never actually finished detailing all the lore about how all this happened (we're talking about a large percentage of the world's population wandering through an art deco Stargate never to return, and the revelation that the gods of humanity sold humanity to infernal powers centuries ago in exchange for the gift of magic)

Then they cash in on the 5e boom by releasing a 5e cut of the setting, set after the timeline's advanced maybe 5 years and a sort of soft return to the status quo has occured (a bit like how SCAG retconned the widely despised 4e Forgotten Realms). Sure there's changes (the Protectorate of Menoth has emigrated overseas en masse, the entire nation of elves is now basically undead, and the skorne empire is a wreck), but the setting is still mostly recognisable. The kickstarters for the 5e books haven't broken any records, but they've been solid (I own all of them, and am playing in an IK game now)

Then, post-pandemic, they released another different iteration of the core minis game, set in a version of the Iron Kingdoms where the timeline has advanced significantly further again and is completely incompatible with the RPG line they're developing and selling at the same time! And they're shifting to an entirely new miniatures line (3d printed) and basically every single previous edition model is now unusable with the new version. Hope you hadn't sunk too much money into your collection, loyal fans. but hey, never mind, you can hardly play the new edition yet anyway because releases are going sooo veeeeerry slooooowwlly.

I love the setting, but I unless some of their other minor game lines are doing MUCH better than I would have guessed, it would look strongly to me like the company is rapidly circling the drain...

 

[delericho]

GW is a weird company, I'll grant you. According to their own market research (allegedly) from 2015, only about 20% of their customers who purchased models were gamers. Most people who bought their models weren't playing GW games they were just painting and displaying their models.

This was me, back in the day - I have hundreds (thousands?) of minis, mostly from GW, but can count on one hand the number of times I've actually played any of their games.

It's probably worth noting that I finally kicked that habit 15 years ago, so it's not exactly a recent example.

 

[Wofano Wotanto]

I love the setting, but I unless some of their other minor game lines are doing MUCH better than I would have guessed, it would look strongly to me like the company is rapidly circling the drain...

I didn't say COVID's hard stop on tourneys was their only problem, but it certainly drove a lot more nails in a coffin that was already pretty well sealed. Some of those issues you're citing go back over a decade, and many of their more recent their business decisions (both pre- and post-COVID) would be baffling if they weren't obviously the result of long development and production cycles and an unwillingness to abort bad plans and adapt when needed. I agree that they're probably doomed unless something major changes for them, but without the added financial and player-bleed effect of losing almost two years of tourneys I'd be a lot more optimistic about their chances. Whether you're a pure casual player like me, a tourney dabbler or a diehard, the plain fact of the matter is that pre-COVID they could count on X amount of sales to the serious tourney chasers - and X got a lot smaller during the shutdown and doesn't seem likely to ever fully recover.