The online community support for E:A is great but with Tyranids selling on ebay for fantastical amounts I sometimes wonder what it would be like to walk into a GW store circa 1995 and pick up everything that is no longer available. It's bizarre that GW have licenced out some board games to Fantasy Flight but won't with Epic.
Here is the link to the interesting article I found on BOLS about a possible future for E:A:
http://www.belloflostsouls.net/2009/06/ ... found.htmlAnd here is the reply I received from GW when I queried them about their inflated prices (and in particular the Vampire Counts Blood Knights):
Many thanks for your letter regarding the price of some of our recent products. We always aim to provide excellent value for our customers within the necessary constraints of manufacturing costs, some of which have risen very significantly in recent years. If I may address your specific points I hope you’ll find the following helps to explain how we go about these things.
I’m afraid that the rising cost of metal and of manufacturing in the UK really has grown enough to justify not only the prices you mention but far greater. This is a genuine concern to us – as you might imagine – and for this reason, wherever possible, we plan to make as many of our larger, bulky and multi-part models as plastic kits. Unfortunately we did not have the resources available to fulfil our original intention and make the Blood Knights in plastic. These are very heavy multi-part models – individually equivalent to elaborate character pieces – and realising the necessary compromise we set the price as low as we could. However, we accept that this is far from ideal and a better compromise might well have been not to have made them at all. It is very unlikely we will make large metal cavalry in the future.
In the case of plastics there is plenty of good news in terms of the cost of individual models – as models that are currently available only as metal become available as plastic. To make this happen faster we are in the process of standardising our tool design and layout. Some of your observations about plastic sets reflect this change. Our plan going forward is to design tools to produce 10 multi-part infantry models or 5 cavalry – which will have a standard price – provisionally £12. This compares with the older style tools which can have anywhere from 12 to 16 infantry on a frame and which generally sell for £18 in the UK. We think this is a fair and consistent approach overall. Note that had we realised our ambition of making the Blood Knights as a plastic kit they too would have been £12. We have just made a new plastic kit of Chaos Knights – and the price has been set at £12. I think you have to agree this represents tremendous value.
I’m afraid comparing our prices to the overall official government rates of inflation doesn’t really address the steep rise in our manufacturing costs. We remain committed to manufacturing in the UK despite this, and remain loyal to our work force of many years. We believe that the skills and experience needed to produce a quality product like ours cannot be sourced in, for example, the cheaper economies of the Far East. The day may come when large volume manufacturing in the UK becomes impractical for us as for many industries; however, we are not there yet. In the meantime we will push ahead with making more models in plastic, and, as always, to find ways of making great product that offers great value to our customers.
GW
(suitably dramatic music)