What we priced out with domestic companies that could have produced those box sets, would have resulted in retail prices of $200 or more per product. There was much feedback during the Kickstarter campaign about using China for production, and while we explained that there was no viable alternative, there was still a strong narrative of simply “trying to save a little money.” That perception is false. Which is actually why Catalyst wanted to slowly begin exploring domestic plastic production. There’s no fighting the math on that, we simply need to face it and build our product models accordingly. The fact is the production cost on these Black Knights was far more than five times that of foreign production. It’s clear that the $25 price surprised some folks-some are in disbelief that domestic production is five times the cost of foreign production. We are proud of the roughly $5 per miniature price on our Force Packs and box products, and it took an enormous amount of work to achieve that. Price-to-value is something we think about all the time. Premium items are produced at a higher quality and in smaller numbers, which require a higher price. And $25 is exactly in line with the pricing of a convention exclusive or specialty item. This is a special release item, not the standard baseline product (such as Force Packs)-so extra value items like variant parts and custom pose-ability are natural features for a product like this. There is no intention of having miniatures like this replace the core line products such as the Force Packs. We like the idea of being to produce and release new miniatures alongside sourcebooks and events in the future. In this case, we chose to produce unique ’Mechs to go alongside the recent Battle of Tukayyid. “Is this the direction their business model is going?” We felt that building up anticipation for a week or more on a mere 300 items was not the way to go. That’s a really good question, and as always hindsight is 20/20. “Why didn’t you communicate this further in advance?”
In fact, production of Black Knights has been ongoing, so you can expect to see them back up for sale in the next 60 days. This is not intended to be a rare item we can keep ordering more until every miniature-loving fan has them.
However, there’s something about this miniature that is unlike most of our catalog, making Catalyst’s initial stock order easier to understand:Ĭreative Juggernaut is domestic, so they can simply print “on demand” and deliver product faster than any overseas producer can ship.Īnd that’s the crux. We hedged our bets and ordered 300 as an initial print run. Catalyst Game Labs simply had to roll the dice on whether or not customers would desire unassembled plastic miniatures at a price that would be viable for a U.S.-based manufacturer. Please keep in mind just how very unusual this product was- BattleTech has never released anything like this before. Social media quickly lit up with a frenzy of comments, so the BattleTech team thought we’d post some insights and answers to the most common questions.
As many of you know, the much-anticipated release of the “Clanbuster” Black Knight happened last week-and promptly sold out in about an hour.
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