“Seems pretty expensive for used models…”

I apologize if the person I’m quoting is reading this! This isn’t about you, at all. It’s about our community, and you just had a particularly pithy quote! This is a totally unfair opinion post, and I’m as guilty as anyone reading.

I’m a member of the local Facebook game trading group, and another one that is near identical but allows auctions. There’s a regular stream of people selling models. Lots of models, entire armies worth of models. How we all ended up with multiple thousands of dollars worth of things that we just don’t want anymore is a topic for another day, but I wanted to write about something I noticed on these public forums. This is a pretty regular post:

WargameX army for sale! Total of $1000 worth of models, but I just want it gone, so it can be yours for only $250!

I want to talk about “pricing ourselves to the bottom”.

This is an expensive hobby. I walked into a store and spent $60 on plastic and card and paint without blinking an eye. When I added up my Tyranid army, it came to about $800. I bought a box of Dark Eldar Warriors at around $45 some years ago. We avoid counting because it’s a really big number when you’re done.

Why do we have such a problem with paying an actual reasonable amount for models? This fellow hobbyist spent $1000 on those models, he lovingly clipped and glued them, he spent hours of his life painting them to a standard that he’s pretty happy with…and we repay him by giving him 25% of what it’s all worth, because they are “used”. Somehow these objects have lost value, even as we put time and work into them!

When you put an army up for sale, you can’t actually put up a number that is anywhere near what the original value is. Even if you saved your buyer 3 hours of work in clipping and gluing. Even if you’ve put a ton of work the paint job and conversions, and if they had been a commission you’d have made money on them, you only get 25% of your original purchase price. Does it make sense?

I originally put my Tyranid army up for $300, knowing that this was an outlandish number. The DE Warriors started at $35, because they were painted damn well. The Tyranid’s ended up selling for $230 after parceling them out, and the Warriors went for $20. I “just wanted them gone”.

 

Sellers! Take some pride in your work! Raise the value of what you’re selling – your models are worth money! You put time and blood into them, and you deserve more than 25%!

Buyers! You spent $100 at GW on a single model, you should be ok paying $50 for a $100 model! We’re all in this together, and that guy you priced down just wants to use your money to buy more models! Help a brother out!

 

(Of note: Like motor vehicles, models seem to lose value the instant they leave the store. I’m not saying try to get 100% back. Maybe 35%. And maybe give me a discount because I’m on your side! :P)