Interesting that this charts by _sets_, not total production volume.
I wonder what the market is like. I'm vaguely aware of Warhammer as a hobby, that's adjacent enough to my social media that I can "see" it, but not people buying miniatures. Does it sit adjacent to railway modelling? Are people making dioramas of Waterloo still?
.. a quick check reveals that OO is 1:76, so they wouldn't quite be right.
That bugged me too; one set that sold a million copies in the 1950s counts for dramatically less than 100 sets that each sell ten thousand copies in 2007, even if they're precisely the same number of soldiers.
Of course the chart is bunk. It represents variety, not volume.
This site isn't about Warhammer, that's an entirely separate hobby. Warhammer figures are much larger (around 1:56, but the characters are mostly superhumans and monsters, so in practice the figures are much larger) and there's more emphasis on stuff like painting and competitive play than diorama or realism.
I did not know that this was a hobby for adults and I find it interesting that the one kid's toy if the other person's collectible. When I was in primary school in the late 70s we used to buy lots of 1/72 scale soldiers on second hand markets and had buckets full of them. Great battles were fought, and we lost lots of them, because we often played in the garden and we apparently were really good at camouflaging those tiny soldiers. For us they were just consumables, but it seems that we had the same Airfix soldiers that collectors buy today.
As a kid I had a bunch in this scale in the ‘90s, purchased in bags of something like 50-100 pieces each from an Everything’s-a-Dollar.
They were among my favorite toys for a long while (and so cheap!). Certainly my favorite “army men”. So detailed, so specific. So many poses. Their size meant a modest living room could host grand, complicated battles. Just great. I’d never seen them for sale since, but I guess that’s because they’d have been in hobbyist shops, not the toy aisle, ordinarily.
My experience is that a lot of dads are getting into these hobby at around the same time their kids are also the age for it. It's something to spend time with the family, as well as multiple families to do together.
Regarding the 3D printing comment in the article: The cost to get started is no longer very high. A $200 A1 Mini with a $13 0.2mm nozzle can produce impressive detail. Example I found from a Google search: https://www.reddit.com/r/BambuLab/comments/195ehda/first_few...
The quality won’t satisfy the hardcore collectors but it’s good enough for kids to play with. The experience of printing them is fun too.
14 comments
[ 30.4 ms ] story [ 30.6 ms ] threadA plastic soldier set is on the order of $20, and collectors will often purchase dozens.
A Bambu A1 mini (which is sufficient for the level of detail needed for these figurines) is about $200, which breaks even after 10 sets.
I wonder what the market is like. I'm vaguely aware of Warhammer as a hobby, that's adjacent enough to my social media that I can "see" it, but not people buying miniatures. Does it sit adjacent to railway modelling? Are people making dioramas of Waterloo still?
.. a quick check reveals that OO is 1:76, so they wouldn't quite be right.
Of course the chart is bunk. It represents variety, not volume.
They were among my favorite toys for a long while (and so cheap!). Certainly my favorite “army men”. So detailed, so specific. So many poses. Their size meant a modest living room could host grand, complicated battles. Just great. I’d never seen them for sale since, but I guess that’s because they’d have been in hobbyist shops, not the toy aisle, ordinarily.
Chart unsigned? (I think number of sets issued, but you can produce 100m soldiers in 5 sets and 1m in 500 sets...)
Website does not work on mobile..
The quality won’t satisfy the hardcore collectors but it’s good enough for kids to play with. The experience of printing them is fun too.