Precinct Omega Podcast - News #45 - You should boycott GW, but not for the reasons you think

I can only apologize for how long it took me to get behind this story. I was on holiday when it first broke and I thought it was a non-issue, so I ignored it and recorded a different episode, then I went away on another short holiday and the story continued to snowball. I got home and recorded this episode immediately, but I already had episodes lined up to cover my period away.

So, finally, here's my detailed look at the astonishing news about Corvus Belli moving to partial manufacturing in plastic.

Wait? What? There's something else going on? A boycott? Seriously?  Again?

Well, OK, I suppose I can talk about that, too.

SCRIPT FOLLOWS

Fri 13th August, which means the world is obviously about to fall down around our ears.

My name is Robey Jenkins

<and my name is Bernard>

And I cannot tell you how much I’ve been looking forward to doing the news this week. Most weeks, finding stuff of sufficient interest to the industry to call it “news” is a challenge at best and, I’d be the first to admit, sometimes I do scrap the barrel a bit. But this week? Well, if you wait long enough, three come along at once. Let’s get to it.

Games Workshop - our favourite wargaming bete noir - has updated its intellectual property statement and people have lost their frikkin’ minds! It’s not a lot of people. Nor is it important people. But they are loud people, so we’ll take a look at the update, why it’s happened, what it means for creators and, specifically, why the Emperor’s Text to Speech Device YouTube series has been impacted.

Second, this week, Games Workshop - yes, them again - has come under fire following revelations about their alleged mistreatment of employees. Now, I may not be an IP lawyer, but I am a Chartered Member of the Chartered Institute of Personnel and Development, the UK’s professional body for HR practitioners. So this is 100% in my wheel-house and I’m going to enjoy dissecting the allegations, their legal significance and what other employers should take away from this object lesson.

Third - and entirely connected to the previous two points - people are calling for a boycott of Games Workshop products. I’ll take a look at the history of GW boycotts and explain why GW doesn’t care about them or the people calling for them. But I will also talk about why, despite this, you should, actually, boycott GW. Sorta.

And finally, thanks to all that’s holy, we have some news this week that is simultaneously legitimately important and not about Games Workshop. Because Corvus Belli, the makers of Infinity the Game, Aristeia! and, technically, some other games has decided to shift at least part of its manufacturing away from white metal and into a new material they are calling “injected thermoplastic”. We’ll take a look at why CB has reached this decision, what injected thermoplastic is, how this move is going to influence the industry as a whole and what you should know about the new material from the hobbyist’s perspective.

DISCUSSION

OK, let’s talk about IP.

I am not a lawyer and this is not legal advice.

So all businesses have intellectual property. This is intangible stuff which holds a quantifiable value. That value may be difficult to quantify and may never be likely to be sold, but it can still be demonstrably shown to possess value. In GW’s case, its IP is very valuable indeed. As I’ve mentioned many times before, their games aren’t, actually, all that good and are designed to be tools to sell miniatures. Even their miniatures, despite being things of beauty, aren’t actually at the pinnacle of design quality, which you’ll mostly find in Japan. What drives the sales of GW products - besides their total dominance of the tabletop wargaming market - is their deep, broad and compelling intellectual property, which has grown to the point of expanding beyond interesting wargamers alone, with their novels finding spaces on the NY Times bestsellers list and their key images becoming memes that are routinely used outside the wargaming context.

So it should be no surprise that GW is keen to protect the value of their IP.

But they’ve not always done it with the highest levels of finesse. There were two important cases, historically, which established some of the limits on GW’s willingness to throw money at IP violation prosecutions. The first was the Chapterhouse Studios case.

CHS was a US microenterprise that made 28mm resin miniatures in GW’s aesthetic. But where they crossed the line from similar enterprises was in specifically making miniatures to fill gaps in GW’s range - something they did entirely without shame or artifice. They actually took names and details from GW’s range of codexes and gave them to their minis, designed to represent characters that GW had invented but for which they had - inexplicably - not released miniatures.

The ins and outs of the case were actually pretty intricate and CHS was lucky to get pro bono representation. The crucial outcomes were, first, that CHS shut up shop and its miniatures never returned to the market, because there was no question that they had absolutely crossed the line; but, more importantly, it established - at least in the state of California, where the case was prosecuted - that after-market products inspired by both GW’s aesthetic and their huge body of colourful characters was 100% legal as long as they didn’t actively transgress GW’s intellectual property. So, just by way of example, you could absolutely create a miniature inspired by the description of Matt Farrer’s terrific Shira Calpurnia Chief Arbitrator, using imagery such as the double-headed eagle, winged fist and shock maul. But you *couldn’t* market it as “Adeptus Arbites, Shira Calpurnia”.

Current businesses such as Artel W, Puppets War, Anvil Industry, Vanguard Miniatures, Battlefleet Bling and many, many others have a model that relies upon this finding for the legality of their existence and, for the most part, play firmly by the rules.

The second important case was that of Spots the Space Marine. Independent author, MCA Hogarth, published a digital novel called “Spots the Space Marine” through Amazon’s platform for self-publishing, and GW issued her a C&D and demanded that Amazon remove the book from availability. Amazon, being utterly unmotivated to stand up for its low value authors, immediately caved. But Hogarth challenged GW’s assertion to the rights to use the term “space marine” in literature, citing many examples of the term being used, most notably by fruit-loop right wing homophobe, Robert Heinlein, in Starship Troopers, which comfortably pre-dated GW’s use of the same term.

Now, it’s important to note that GW’s use of “space marines” in the manufacture of tabletop miniatures is, actually, pretty well established in law. Companies like Puppets War, who make armoured space warriors in a similar vein, cannot call them “space marines” for that reason. But the Spots case was launched when the Black Library was getting big sales and the aforementioned NY Times bestseller list appearances. They didn’t want anyone else muscling in on “their” territory by using the “space marine” term to entice readers into thinking their novel was one set in the 40kverse.

Nevertheless, Hogarth - again, with pro bono representation - saw off the attempt, GW dropped the claim, paid damages to Hogarth and Spots went back on sale. You can still buy it. It’s… fine.

And, with that lengthy preamble out of the way, let’s get up to date.

Following these two cases, GW published their first IP guidelines. And we need to tackle what these really are and what they aren’t.

What they aren’t - despite many people’s understanding - is a set of rules about what you can do with GW’s IP and what you can’t. You see, GW doesn’t have that power.  The rules about what you can and can’t do with another party’s IP are set by government legislation and they are enforced by the courts. And whilst the lobbyists of big IP owners might well have some traction when it comes to formulating those rules, and whilst money does, indeed, talk loudly in the courts of trademark and copyright infringement, the companies don’t, ultimately, have any right to tell you what you can and can’t do with their IP.

What they can do - and what GW’s IP guidelines do - is tell you what kinds of uses the IP owner will happily ignore what kinds of uses they won’t. GW has had an IP statement for at least a decade, now (I honestly can’t remember if it was first issued before or after the Spots debacle), and it hasn’t changed much. So why update it now?

Well, there are two big answers to that question:

1. Astartes, and
2. Warhammer Plus

And these two answers are related. Astartes, you see, was a five-part CGI animation with no dialogue that nevertheless managed to be superior to anything any licensed movie or animation had yet done in terms of both the quality of the animation and the intensity of the narrative, which was filled with nuance, mystery and brutal action that had even the most half-hearted 40k fan grinning and air-punching like the nerds we all truly are at heart. If you’ve not seen it, tough. It’s not available any more because GW offered the animator a contract in return for them taking it down quietly. That was the carrot version of the offer. The stick just sat, unmentioned, on the desk between them. Metaphorically.

My thoughts on Warhammer Plus were recorded a few episodes ago and, generally, I think it’s more a response to the incipient threat of 3d printing than it is of that of fan animations. However, a big part of Warhammer Plus’s preliminary offering is a series of professionally-made short animations by a range of talented professionals including the guy behind Astartes, Syama Pedersen.

Consequently, GW’s lawyers very sensibly thought that now was a good time to update the IP statement to make it clear that fan animations were now considered to be treading on GW’s ability to make money from its IP.

Now, whether this is true or not, and under what circumstances it would or wouldn’t be true, is something that could only be tested in court. But the IP statement now made it clear that GW would be looking hard at fan animations and potentially taking action against them.

So much, to be honest, so ho-hum. There was some minor discussion of this update on the forums, but most people couldn’t give much of a stuff. Until, that is, TTS got involved.

No, not Tabletop Simulator who, you’ll be pleased to know, is entirely unaffected by the IP statement update. Rather, it’s a long-running YouTube web series called The Emperor’s Text to Speech Device - TTS is the abbreviation for Text To Speech - and it imagines what would happen if someone fixed up a text to speech device to the Golden Throne of the Immortal Corpse-God Emperor of the Imperium of Man.

It’s been running since 2015 with multiple seasons and an ever-expanding cast of memorable characters and, whilst it definitely has its moments, its humour is mostly built upon the Emperor being the equivalent of a foul-mouthed great-grandad with poor personal boundaries. Don’t get me wrong, it is funny at times. And it’s a fun way to imagine some of the more persistent and extreme complaints of the 40k community being injected into the Dark Millennium. But it’s not exactly high-brow stuff. If you like it, no judgement.

However, when the updated IP statement was issued, its creator - Bruva Alphabusa - issued an announcement that he would, as a result, cease making the series immediately. And it was as if a million prepubescent geek voices cried out as one and were suddenly not silenced.

So first I want to take a look at how TTS was affected by the updated statement. In fact, Bernard, would you do the honours?

<No.>

You don’t want to?

<No, the answer is “no”. TTS was not affected by the changes to the updated IP statement.>

It wasn’t affected by the statement?

<No, it was already affected by the existing IP statement. The changes made no difference to how TTS was affected.>

That’s right. You see, TTS uses GW’s artwork and photography to make its animations.  It’s undeniably part of its charm, but it’s also undeniable that TTS was already abusing GW’s intellectual property long before the changes were made to the IP statement.

All that really changed was that GW specifically called out fan animations, and Bruva Alphabusa - not unreasonably, to be fair - concluded that GW would shortly be coming for him.

But there are a few more details that should be acknowledged. First is “fair use” law. Basically, this allows the reasonable use of another entity’s intellectual property for academic, review and parody purposes. The academic part is what allows academics to quote works and other forms of IP without needing the author’s permission. The review part is what allows reviewers to include images provided by a manufacturer to illustrate their reviews and inform their opinions. The parody part is more nuanced but, generally speaking, intellectual property can be used by a third party to parody the owner of the IP. However, the freedom to use their IP varies enormously between regions. In the US, for example, there’s a lot more leeway than there is in the UK.

TTS has both a parody and review right to make use of the IP, because they not only parody GW’s 40k setting but also make critical commentary upon new releases and products, justifying it as a review medium. The question in court would be whether the extent of their use of GW’s own artwork - some of which remains at least partially the intellectual property of the artists who created it, by the way - is justified in the medium. My guess is that TTS took legal advice and was told that, no, it almost certainly wasn’t.

I guess this is the case because Bruva Alphabusa because at the time he pulled the plug, was receiving the equivalent of over $100,000 per year from Patreon supporters of his channel. So, despite GW’s big guns, if he had been so inclined, Bruva Alphabusa could easily have afforded to contest his position if he felt it was justifiable in court. The fact that he chose not to is a good sign that he knew he would lose and that he would end up owing GW a huge settlement in compensation for the unlicensed use of their IP.

But I also think there’s another angle to this story.

Like I said, Bruva Alphabusa has been running TTS for six years. And there’s a lot of TTS content that all rests on basically a single joke. He’s a creative and talented guy, locked into his creation by the curse of “too much money to stop now”. The IP update from GW provides him not only with a clear and present danger to his income, but also with a perfect excuse to stop doing it and move on to something more suited to the version of himself that is six years older than the one that first thought the TTS joke was funny. He already has a dedicated audience and, sure, he might lose some of them if he moves on to something else, but he’ll enjoy creative freedom and will most likely retain enough of his audience to keep a decent income. Hell, he might get enough new supporters out of “screw GW” sympathy that he ends up making more money.

From my perspective, it looks like a win-win. Alphabusa gets to do the thing he’s wanted to do for ages and GW takes the blame!

We’ll come back to the fall-out from this whole thing shortly, but first I want to move to a different storm of criticism GW has recently faced: their treatment of their employees.

Recently there has been a trend on Twitter asking people in creative industries about things they were not allowed to say due to NDAs but which, because the NDA has lapsed, they can now talk about. This has led to some fascinating and disturbing revelations, particularly from the electronic games industry which, with Activision Blizzard being outed for their frat-boy culture, is kicking up yet another storm.

But GW got caught up in this when a couple of former employees talked about their perceived mistreatment by the company. Now, I don’t know the people involved, but I certainly know people who know them well and two of those people are James Hewitt and Sophie Williams, who run the independent game design consultancy, Needy Cat Games. By every account, James and Sophie are the epitome of what we’d like our industry to be. But I am going to take a bit of a look at their allegations and allegations of other former employees.

All of this started with a screenshot on Twitter of the official FAQ answer to a question about why GW doesn’t list salaries for its advertised jobs. A crucial thing James talked about was how different people in GW could be on very different salaries for doing the same job. And if you listened to my interview with Jake Thornton, you’ll know that one thing that led Jake and GW to mutually agree to go their separate ways was that Jake had ended up on a salary much higher than his role at the time deserved.

James also talked about how the culture in GW assumed that the mere privilege of working at GW was effectively worth money in itself and that there was an expectation that staff would be doing extra work in their own time because they were “passionate” about the hobby - a passion which he, for various reasons, not least being the knowledge that he was being underpaid, felt he no longer really had, although he was happily doing his job within the terms of his contract.

As a result of his disclosures, his business partner, Sophie, talked about how her maternity leave from GW was mishandled, her nominated replacement was, well, replaced and how her job was eliminated and she was reassigned without consultation while on maternity leave.

Others have since spoken up to talk in more detail about documents known internally as “The Big Red Book” and, later, “The Big Black Book” which set out the company’s expectations of how their employees would behave and engage with the company’s mission.

All of this, meanwhile, is set against the mainstream media reporting on GW’s recent profit-sharing exercise in which all employees received a pro rata bonus of £5000 after a year of record profits for the company.

Some outside observers - and, it should be said, James himself - have pointed out that the criticisms are about behaviour that’s at least four years old, and that the bonus suggests that things have changed.

As an HR observer, I would suggest that, on the contrary, the bonus suggests that exactly nothing has changed.

Let’s talk about the bonus, first of all.

I have mentioned recently how impressed I’ve been with GW’s marketing and publicity strategy lately - how much more sophisticated it has become and how much more connected with the outside world it seems to be. And the bonus news is a great illustrator. You see, the bonus was paid at the end of April - just after the end of GW’s financial year, when its preliminary results were reported to its shareholders. The bonus was, therefore, a statement to its shareholders and investors to say “look how well we are doing that we can afford to bestow such largesse upon the proles”.

Now, I’m not saying it didn’t also emerge from a generally benevolent attitude towards its employees. Self-serving motivations can exist in parallel with more generous ones. But I am saying that the power of the statement to the investors was a greater motivator to paying the bonus than a sense of gratitude towards the employees.

Furthermore, news of this bonus hit the mainstream media at the same time as criticism about the workplace culture was leaking out onto Twitter, and the storm over the IP update was just taking off. Why, it’s almost like someone at GW got their friends in the press to create SEO-optimised good news about GW to take the heat off the company just when they needed it!

Like I said: I’m very impressed by whoever is heading up the marketing and publicity team at GW, these days. They have certainly studied their Machiavelli.

With that dealt with, let’s talk about salary, because I’ve been around this buoy a few times with employers who try to tell employees not to discuss their salaries.

It is simply impossible to make employees not discuss their salaries. It’s as futile as Cnut and the tide. But the utter pointlessness of it aside, there is only one reason to not let employees discuss salaries, even if it were possible, and that’s to disguise the fact that you can’t actually justify why people are paid what they are paid.

I’ve beaten my head on a desk about this time and time again in the past, when employers have offered potential recruits a salary that’s either way higher than the job deserves on the basis that “that’s what we have to pay to get them” or way lower, “because that’s all they’ve asked for”. The only question worth asking is what value the work of the employee provides to the company. And there are tools and methods for calculating that which have been well tested over and over again for decades, the most popular being the Hay model for commercial enterprises - but there are others, such as the modified GLPC scheme, which is best suited to public sector and charitable enterprises.

Many companies use bespoke systems, but almost all of them are built up on one of these two methods. The whole point of these systems is to ensure that an employee is paid a salary commensurate with the level of responsibility they hold and the value of the work they perform. And in this scenario, any employee’s salary can be justified objectively using the system. As a result, there is no reason in this kind of workplace to try to stop people talking about their salary - which, remember, they’re going to do anyway - because everyone knows that their salary has been objectively assessed.

Now, a system like this doesn’t mean that two people doing the same job can’t be paid different amounts. If one of them has done the job for two weeks and one for five years, then the latter person is likely to be paid more than the former. If one has consistently outstanding performance results and the other doesn’t, then, again, the former should be paid more than the latter. If one has no disciplinary warnings and the other has several then, again, it should be no surprise that the former is paid more than the latter.

You may argue the fairness of the disciplinary warnings - there are systems in place to do exactly that - but the principle is sound: if you have a fair framework by which to assess a person’s value to the business then there is no reason why you shouldn’t be able to talk about who earns what.

And, going back to job adverts, this can then inform the offered salary for a role.

You should always advertise a salary, even if it’s a “starting from…” figure. And if you’re going to advertise a maximum figure for a role, assume that all candidates will ask for that amount. If you’re not prepared to offer it, don’t put it on the advert.

That’s the facts about salary and salary setting.

Now, let’s talk about culture.

For a long time, in the HR business, there was this idea that culture was something that could be imposed upon an organization, a bit like a uniform: that, through the use of haptic cues and policy rules an executive team could somehow shape its workforce into being what they wanted it to be. When I was doing my postgraduate qualification, this was the idea I was taught and, to be honest, I pretty much bought it even though, in retrospect, it’s patently not true.

A couple of weeks ago I talked about emergent properties in games design and their relationship with chaos theory. Well, culture is another emergent property and one over which an executive team can exercise very little actual control. You certainly can’t dictate a culture through a book - Big, Black or even Little and Red. There is one - and only one - thing that an organisation’s leaders can do to influence the culture they want to see in their business, and that’s to live it themselves.

It’s amazing how often I’ve heard business leaders moan about the lack of willingness of employees to work beyond their contracted hours, only to watch the same leaders knock off early on a Tuesday to hit the golf course. Or, contrarywise, I’ve heard leaders talk about how important it is to them that their employees enjoy a healthy work-life balance only to find the boss at their desks on a Saturday morning.

If you want to see culture change in a business, it has to start at the top, and it has to be sustained.

That said, you can’t force people to buy into a culture. I’ve often said to managers, frustrated at a perceived “lack of passion” in their employees, that they should be happy - delighted, in fact - to have employees who turn up on time, work hard, meet targets and don’t abuse their colleagues. You may be surprised how rare those employees actually are. When you get them, treasure them. In some ways, the people who buy into the passion of a small business’s owner are the people most likely to burn out, because - unlike the owner - they aren’t reaping the physical benefits of a business’s success. The owner gets fat dividend payments and can expand their salary at will. The employee’s benefit from a business’s success is usually fixed at their salary and, perhaps, a bonus. Their psychological feedback just isn’t on the same level as the person whose whole identity is bound up in the success of the business.

When you value cultural buy-in over competence who get situations like the ones Sophie faced. The mishandling of her maternity leave was very unprofessional, without question. It’s the kind of scenario I’ve seen many times affect people who have to be away from their job for an extended period. And, obviously, tends to affect women more than it affects men. But when it comes to poor management, GW’s behaviour on the axes of incompetence and malice is still at the bottom left of the chart.

And all of this, finally, brings us to the latest call to boycott Games Workshop.

I remember the first one of these being in the early 90s when GW started seeding shops on every uK high street they could get into. They flooded the market with GW stores - many of which were never going to be profitable - with one objective and one objective only: to force small independents who sold miniatures from other companies out of business. And it worked. Dozens of small wargaming stores, some of which had been in business for decades, shut up shop and disappeared. Then GW rationalised its least profitable stores and the market for tabletop wargames was pretty much sewn up. Warhammer and “wargaming” would be synonymous in the UK for generations.

They tried to do the same thing in the US, but underestimated - as many have before and since - just how bloody large that place is. This is why the FLGS remains a common feature of US towns and small cities, but in the UK is much rarer.

Back then, there was a call to boycott GW. It didn’t take.

Then there was another one during and after both the CHS and Spots cases. Again, it had no impact.

And this time?

It won’t matter. GW doesn’t care about your boycott for two reasons: first, only a small fraction of their market is even going to hear about the news we’ve discussed this week; and of those, only an even smaller fraction is going to care. Out of those who do care and do decide to boycott GW, most of those will give up on their boycott when they realize that they can’t get regular games against a wide variety of opponents without playing GW games.

So don’t boycott GW because you think it’ll make them listen, change their IP statement or bring back TTS. Don’t boycott GW because you think their employment practices suck. They do, but that’s because they’re a big company and the employment practices of all big companies ultimately suck.

However, that’s not the same thing as me saying “don’t boycott GW”.

In fact, I absolutely think you should boycott GW, just… not for the reasons other people think you should do it. I think you should boycott GW because in almost every respect, if your experience of miniatures wargaming relies on GW, you are accepting second best - or worse. Their miniatures aren’t the best. Their paints aren’t the best. Their games definitely aren’t the best. Even their story setting - cool as it is - isn’t the best.

The only thing that GW actually has going for it is its ubiquity. You can easily buy new stuff and find online content to help you use it and find real life opponents to play their games. If all you want out of miniatures wargaming is to have the reassurance of a regular opponent, then that’s what GW gives you. In almost every other respect, they simply aren’t the best thing on the market.

So go ahead and boycott GW - not because they’re bad, but because they’re… meh.

Buy minis from Wargames Atlantic. Play Kings of War. Use Vallejo paints. Create an account at Wargame Vault. Read Dune or A Game of Thrones or the Honor Harrington series. Try out and explore games, products and tools that aren’t made by GW for a while. It might make it harder to find an opponent, but it might also open up doors to meet new opponents who can tell you about other games and products and tools that, if you stay within the comforting familiarity of Games Workshop, you’d never even knew existed.

Now, obviously, if you’re listening to this podcast on a regular basis, I probably don’t need to tell you this. But if you think that there are other people who should hear this message - albeit after wading through the best part of an hour of business chat - then why not share it with them and see what they think.

Boycott GW. Not because they’re bad, but because we deserve better.

<That was dramatic>

It was, wasn’t it?

<But now you have to talk about SioCast.>

Oh, yeah.

OK, let’s come back down to Earth, because this is actually interesting.

SIOCast has been around for a little while. They are a Spanish company seeking to offer small-scale miniatures manufacturers in the UK, EU and US a practical alternative to either white metal casting or outsourcing to China.

White metal has been an increasing problem for casters of all sizes. It has a lot going for it: the fidelity of casting is outstanding. Its malleability makes it easy to bend parts and metal is easy to cut and file to create multi-part miniatures and conversions. It’s also, compared to plastic, very easy to cast in a sub-industrial space like a shed or garage, whilst also being quite scalable if you want to cast in quantity.

Meanwhile, it also has some major drawbacks. Modern hobbyists increasingly lack the patience to work with it, given the diversity of plastic miniatures that are available. Its weight and hardness mean that paint can chip or wear relatively easily. And it’s expensive! It’s always been expensive to ship because of the weight. But now it’s becoming expensive to buy, too, with the price of tin, in particular, having soared over the last couple of years. And that’s before you get into the question of sourcing for the component metals used in the white metal alloy, of which tin is the largest contributor but far from the only one.

Corvus Belli has long resisted a shift to plastic because, for excellent reasons, they wanted to be able to keep manufacturing in-house and wanted to be certain of both supply and quality. White metal has, for years, been their go-to product for manufacturing because it has met their standards on both of these measures. But as their designs have become larger and more sophisticated, the pressure has been growing. And their Kickstarter exclusive scifi dungeon crawler, Defiance, included a monster miniature, the Megalodron, cast in a new material.

Their previous board game, Aristeia, has plastic miniatures cast in board games quality plastic in China. They are fine. But not great. But the Megalodron was cast in Spain, and it came in this new thing: injected thermoplastic.

OK, to materials scientists, this isn’t a new thing at all. I learned about thermoplastics versus thermosetting plastics when I did my DT GCSE back in the 90s. I’m no expert, but the key factor of a thermoplastic is that, after it’s set, it can be melted down and re-cast. This massively reduces the waste arising from miscasts and casting gates in resin casting - and eliminates the need for the sprues used on HIPS - High Impact PolyStyrene as used in most plastic miniatures and which contributes vast quantities of waste to landfill.

Of course, it has also, historically, made thermoplastics vulnerable to distortion in heat and, as a result, tended to mean casting pretty soft levels of detail.

But the company SIOCast seems to have found a formulation for injectable thermoplastic that gets around this to produce levels of detail fidelity equivalent to white metal. In addition, their product requires a high enough heat to liquify and become injectable that there seems to be very little risk of heat-related distortion of cast miniatures. Unless you actually take a blow-torch to your minis, they shouldn’t be melting in the back of your car on even an abnormally hot day in the Sahara Desert.

Most impressively, to my mind, is that SIOCast has productified the entire process.

<Is that a word?>

It is now. Because they’ve made every stage of the process into a product they can sell. SIOCast sells the machines that make the moulds, and the machine that does the injection and the materials to make both moulds and casts, and - perhaps most importantly - the training on how to use those devices and the on-going support you’ll need to maintain them. It’s all clever as hell, and SIOCast is gambling on the idea that professional cast models in their robust, high-performance material is going to still enjoy a substantial market even in the face of a growing popularity for hobby 3D printing.

There’s a lot going for SIOCast, right now. I was aware that CreatureCaster had adopted it as a material for some projects developed with a new design partner. But to hear that Corvus Belli - who have been almost dogmatic about their conviction that white metal was the only material to offer the quality control and fidelity that they wanted for their products - have committed to using SIOCast is a huge step forward. It’s basically an announcement that the most quality-obsessed company in miniatures wargaming believes that SIOCast can give them what they want.

And that’s a huge deal.

PRECINCT OMEGA

Oh, and so we reach the part of the podcast where I get to talk about Precinct Omega. I think some of the relevance is obvious and some of it isn’t, so I’ll keep it brief.

First, on the off chance that you are a small business owner in need of HR consulting, advice or strategic guidance, I am available. I am qualified, insured and can provide quotes for a range of services, depending upon your needs and the size of your business.

Yes, I mostly write wargames for money, these days, but I can still plan and execute an organizational change plan with the best of them, and I can re-write your policies like a demon, to make them into something that your employees will actually want to read. How do you think I learned how to write wargames rules? I can even consult on ISO 9001 and 14001 certifications, if you want to save money by improving your internal quality management systems.

Second, if you are thinking of dipping your toes into a game that isn’t a Games Workshop one, then might I gently recommend that you check out the Horizon Wars series of games from Precinct Omega Publishing and available via Wargame Vault. Horizon Wars: Zero Dark is a skirmish game in which you can use your existing miniatures to make up small teams of heroes and take on larger forces of bad guys, solo, co-op or in PvP “Versus” mode. And Horizon Wars: Infinite Dark is a spaceship combat game built on a version of the same rules. So if you still have Battlefleet Gothic sitting in a foam case gathering dust, or thought you’d try Aeronautica Imperialis but found it less than exciting, then maybe this is a chance to give those minis a new lease of life.

Unlike GW, Precinct Omega does care about you. Games Workshop doesn’t, because their size makes them immune to criticism in all but the most extraordinary situations. So if you have feedback about any of my rules, the Horizon Wars setting or my miniatures - currently just the Ballmonsters, but I have more on their way, slowly - you can always tell me - ideally via my patreon, but I can be emailed at precinctomega@gmail.com.

In fact, if you want to really take your frustrations out on a miniatures wargaming company, you should definitely start a “boycott Precinct Omega” campaign, because I guarantee it will make me cry and it might actually ruin my life. If, on the other hand, you would like to do something more positive about your dissatisfaction with GW, how about, instead of looking to put someone down, find something to lift up. It doesn’t have to be me - although it can be if you like. It could be Infinity the Game or Star Wars Legion or even Marvel Crisis Protocol. But why not something from a small, independent designer on Wargame Vault. I guarantee that they will appreciate your custom much more than GW will ever notice its absence.

And what about SIOCast?

I’ve talked before about my plans to develop miniatures for my games, and my choice being between white metal and resin and why I’d choose one over the other. Well, I can’t lie: I’m very interested in what SIOCast can offer - probably not to me, I’m far too small. But I will certainly be interested to find out if any of my regular casting partners are looking at moving into SIOCast or where I might be able to contract some SIOCast manufacturing in the UK.

But first, I will definitely be looking to get my hands on some SIOCast products from Corvus Belli to put it through the paces and see exactly what can and can’t be done.

Rest assured, when I get some, I’ll have the camera running to record the results.

PROGNOSTICATIONS

Next week, we’ll be looking at design again, and for a topic, I’ll be thinking about command and control.

Much is said about the fog of war, about morale and about the role of the commander on the tabletop. We’ll look at how different games reflect different kinds of leadership and what designers need to think about when building a command and control system for their game.

So I’ll speak to you again… next week.