Discontinuation

On a day when Citadel Miniatures have discontinued swathes of Fantasy models, it seems fitting to look at why models get discontinued.

There are multiple reasons, so I'll take them step by step.

Wear and tear

Most models, and most mass-produced items, rely on cast components. To have a cast component that is precisely shaped how it should be requires high-quality moulds. For metal or resin, these moulds are soft, made of vulcanised rubber or silicone, which allows for significant traps (places where the mould goes behind a protruding element like a rifle). For plastic, the moulds, or tools, are made from steel blocks, which cannot tolerate traps, either necessitating filling, where the forward element has been merged into the details behind, multiple components, or complex tools with strangely articulated elements.

Soft moulds are, comparatively cheap to produce, but they are soft and wear out quickly (depending on the quality after 25-250 castings in most cases). Thus moulds need replaced fairly regularly, and so crisp castings, are required for making these new moulds, but they, too, will degrade over time. When a mould wears out, a decision has to be made as to whether continued sales will justify the expense of pressing or pouring a new mould. When the masters wear out, new moulds are no longer possible. So, eventually, every metal or resin model will cease  to be reproducible.

Tools, for styrene and similar plastics, are significantly more durable, but are extremely expensive when compared to soft moulds. Where a soft mould can be made for under £100, the cheapest tools are generally at least £1000, so to justify the expense of tooling you need to be sure of selling enough casts to make back the expense and still make a profit.  While a steel tool will rarely wear out, when they do, it's expensive to replace, and so sometimes plastic figures, especially the most popular ones, like Space Marine Tactical Squads, will need new tools, and at that stage they might as well get a resculpt with new options or cosmetic differences.

Sales

While we don't like to think that some of our favourite models weren't popular, if a model doesn't sell, it's pointless keeping it on the books. There are numerous examples of models that have hit this stumbling block, far too many to list, but often entire games don't sell enough models to justify the range being maintained. Within Citadel's range alone, Man O'War, Space Fleet/Battlefleet Gothic, Inquisitor, Epic, Mordheim, Blood Bowl and Necromunda have all had their ranges dropped entirely (although some have since started to make a comeback).

Plastic models can be especially vulnerable to this, as casting plastic requires huge runs, since a sprue is spat out every 30 seconds or so. As soon as enough are made to make a profit after  the tooling costs, if it's not selling, the expense of subsequent runs don't make financial sense, unless something changes that will drastically increase their sales. A significant example is in the hybrid models Citadel produced in the late 1980s through to the mid 2000s, which had metal trunks with plastic arms and weapons.

The trunks remained in production for many years after they were replaced by all plastic kits, a handful of the Space Marines are still on sale even today. With Space Marines, the superstar headliners of Games Workshop, new plastic arm, backpack and weapons sprues made sense. For the Imperial Guard, whose hybrids were a much smaller range and were, for the most part, replaced by the all-metal regiments from 1994 on, the plastic arms sprue was no longer sold in sufficient numbers, so the components shifted to being cast in metal, as they could do a single, small batch of maybe 20 sets, when they needed them, rather than ending up with the hundreds they'd need to produce to make the set up for a batch in plastic worthwhile, hundreds of which might never sell.

Contrary to popular belief, however, the squats, while victims of poor sales for their plastic core sets and hybrids, weren't dropped because of poor sales globally, and were actually selling better than some other ranges at the time.

Redesign

Over time, ranges evolve, technology allows for detail that was impossible only a few years earlier. Most manufacturers take pride in producing the best products they can, so, eventually, many models will get replaced with shiny new models that are more poseable, less blocky, etc. While some companies try to keep the old models available alongside the new ones, sales of both will suffer, and so, whether immediately or eventually, the old models are superceded and the new ones become standard.

The most common reason for redesign, historically, has been to change materials, most commonly moving from single piece metal to multipart plastic, that allows for far more options than metal: a set can thus go from, say, having a corporal with machine pistol and a soldier with a light machine gun and  the rest with a standard rifle to having a range of machine pistols, a few different machine guns, and even 2 different rifles for the basic troops.

Nowadays, there's another, significant reason for companies that can do so to regularly redesign their popular models: knock off recasting by third parties. While there are legal means to address the copyright infringement, doing so is time consuming and expensive, and it's often more practical to just discontinue the copied model and release a replacement. While this doesn't stop the counterfeiting, it takes some of the value from them, and, thus, can have a knock on effect in whether the counterfeiters judge the cost and risks of continued production worthwhile.

Evolution of the game

While historical games aren't vulnerable to this, as the units involved in, say, the Napoleonic Wars, don't change over time, with science fiction, fantasy and modern settings, this is a frequent issue, and is largely the reason for today's discontinuations.

As a game evolves, rules change, and units stop being regularly used. While most games will try to keep units from the past viable and fieldable, since failing to do so can see a mass exodus from the player base to other systems, eventually it reaches a tipping point. At some point it's not worth producing models that aren't going to sell, as explained above.

To give some examples:
In first edition 40k, the Imperial Guard had assault squads with a pair of pistols, beastmen squads, penal legion and suicide bombers. This was all fine, allowed beastmen an interesting place in 40k, and gave some good speed bumps and some fun random blasts from the suicide bombers. The issues came from the fact that an assault squad or beastman squad had to remain with 12" of a command squad, weighed down with a pair of lascannon. By the time second edition came out, sales of Imperial Imperial beastmen had tanked and assault squads had never been that much better, and suicide bombers had gone from a joke to a real threat, at home and abroad. With that, the Guard lost their beastmen and suicide bombers at the gate, and assault squads when the Codex came out, and penal legion was downgraded to a special character and a single squad, Col. Schaefer's Last Chancers, since the penal troops of old seemed in poor taste.

Void 1.1 was a platoon or company sized sci-fi game, with a core system largely borrowed from Mutant Chronicles: Warzone second edition, after Target Games went belly-up in 1999. The core of the miniature range was rushed out, so that the new company, i-Kore, could sell miniatures, while the basic rules for the original game were given away free. After a couple of years, the game had grown, the need for every force to draw from a central core of units, with their own special additions had fallen away, as each faction had a wide range of faction specific models, so the generics started to fall away, in favour of new models that fit closer to the distinct aesthetics of the new range. Over time, Void shifted into Urban War, a squad-level skirmish game, and, with that, the focus shifted from models that looked good in squads to more detailed models that have more character and can stand up to the added scrutiny that character models are subject to, and with that, came further evolution of the aesthetics, as the new models allowed much more detail, when the need for uniformity across squads fell away. In time, the older models fell out of circulation, although they are, for the most part, still available on-line.

The case in today's discontinuation comes from the shift from the long established Warhammer Fantasy, set in the Old World, for the most part, to Age of Sigmar, with a completely new rules set, new setting, etc. In these circumstances, some legacy forces and units will, inevitably fall by the wayside, either because the new rules don't suit them or the new setting makes them difficult to fit into the revised background. Today's discontinuations are a number of old sets that have become outshone by other, newer units. Dwarf clansmen, runelords, etc., are, largely, replaced by their more elite units, and the new Kharadron Overlords and Fyreslayers. The Empire units are archers, who, while i would have fielded 20-100 regularly, were never that common in general, old characters that have been hovering around for years, without really being needed in the range they had, and priests, which, in a world where there are angels walking around in most armies, simply no longer seem necessary. As for the Elves, I'm afraid that I haven't fielded them in 16 years, so I can't really comment.

Games evolve, units stop being worthwhile, and, over time, models drop out of production. It's tempting for the nostalgic amongst us to get up in arms, or at least annoyed, when models we have fond memories of from yesteryear are sent to the scrapheap, even more so when it's models for a force we've planned and are in the middle of building, as i am with the Dispossessed. These days, with Ebay and similar sites offering second hand models globally, rather than having to rely on your local hobby shops and classified ads to have the models in question in stock, the discontinuation of lines is significantly less crippling for our hobby than it once was.

While we may like all the models ever made to be in constant production, we have to accept that manufacturers are businesses, and need to make a profit, and with all the factors involved, the lifespan of any models is, intrinsically finite. A relaunch of RTB01, Imperial Space Marines from 1987, for example, might get a burst of nostalgia sales, but the quality of the kit just doesn't hold up to modern standards on detail, poseability, options, etc., and so any rerelease would be very limited in sales, and probably not worth the overheads. Time moves on, and we get new, better models.