Excellent article, thank you! I’ve always been intrigued by Warhammer 40k fans and now I finally get it.
The bottleneck isn’t acquiring plastic. The bottleneck is everything else.
This is spot on. I’ve had resin printers for ~6 years now, I’m quite skilled at adding supports to models (and despise pre-supported ones). I bought the first one fully intending to print RPG minis and maybe also make my own 40k army. Printed a lot of minis, printed some on commission, sold some, including 40k, but never made an army, “my” army, I get stuck at choosing a force/faction and then making the composition. The ready made combat patrols just feel “meh”
Most importantly, I only know one 40k group and they play ~30km away from where I live. I already do that kind of trip every single day for work, so that was a huge dampener to me.
Nice article! As an outsider I still don’t get why people wouldn’t sell/buy unpainted minis for cheap (e.g. on etsy)
I guess the same reason they don’t buy reprinted magic cards for cheap.
Do I know the reason? No. But I guess it is the same.
True, I had to think of magic cards, too. I would definitely print my own cards if I’d play nowadays…
Same reason people prefer the original thing over cheap copies, even the perfect replicas. This is valid for pretty much everything: art, clothing, videogame cartridges, plastic toys, boardgames.
I’ve never understood why people buy clothing from expensive brands (except for when there is a real expectation of quality/durability)
Like, I understand it if the choice were only between original and poor-quality rip-off. But usually you can just go with something else that isn’t by an expensive brand and isn’t a rip-off…
Great article. Thanks
There is already a dump of loads of models many are scanned but with enough quality to pass for original. And the GW fuckers jack the prices like no tomorrow. Is like they are blind. I’m one of those that Warhammer costs kept me on just the lore side, now that they are getting some traction they just want to rip us a new one in greed, instead of make it affordable for new comers they make it worse making piracy more enticing.
But where are those models. The author tried to found open torrents but couldn’t.
I’m on a number of telegram groups that shares models, there was a big nuking last year, with them going unlisted, but still active. Russians don’t give a fuck
I haven’t watched the video, but they probably only used English language torrent sites and western search engines which censor a lot of piracy related results, I was able to find these in a few seconds using Yandex:
torrents: https://rutracker.org/forum/viewtopic.php?t=6719432 (in Russian but you can easily use built in browser translation to make it readable)
and direct downloads: https://stl3d.pro/category/3d-print-model/warhammer/ (that second site requires signing up for an account)
I was able to get .stl’s from both, I don’t have a 3D printer to check how they’d come out but they look good in a viewer
I also found some telegram channels but haven’t tested those links
Seems like the author isn’t super familiar with piracy and didn’t put in enough effort and do their due diligence trying to find the files beyond surface level searching, or (tinfoil hat on) are a GW plant trying to discourage people from finding affordable ways to engage in the tabletop side of the hobby
STLexandria torrent on TL?
STLForest on telegram
If you’re just wanting to play it, you don’t really need the models, do you? Couple of packets of the cheapest army men you can find in the toy shop will do it you want fancy pieces, but just folding a piece of card in half so that it stands upright and writing on it what it is will suffice.
3D printing would do very nicely for the one-off models that you don’t want to kitbash, of course. Also great for playing DnD with; another game where you’re not obliged to use the ‘genuine books’ to play either.
