A week ago a representative from Legacy Miniatures posted a comment to a news item on Tabletop Gaming News about their latest batch of releases. Posts on TGN get buried pretty quickly, as news is uploaded to the site at a steady pace throughout any given day; and since Legacy’s response didn’t appear until the post was already five days old, it’s very possible many people are still in the dark about what’s in store for the range in the near future. The response is therefore quoted here in full:
Legacy Miniatures wrote:
November 7, 2011 at 3:55 am
Hi,
I take the opportunity to explain and answers to some of the complains I read in these last months.
First of all thanks for posting them, we were expecting them and it is important for us to read and react.
As David from CMON said things are not always black and white.
I will explain where we come from and why we acted in a certain way and not in another:
CMON has no responsibilities on the pricing, we sell them the waves at a certain price and of course they charge their profit margin. So no need to attack them, they are just doing their job.
We are located in China, finding a trustworthy resin caster is very difficult and we found a solution that is still too expensive. For you and for us. We are now in the process to reconsider the whole process.
We wanted to provide an impeccable product in term of quality; this is the reason why a resin mould is used only for few casts (5 to 8 depending on the piece) and why we inserted a plastic tray. We understood now that these solutions are too expensive so from future waves we will change this approach. We also work the miniatures with a system of integrated plugs and this is also an additional cost.
We collected all the resins masters left by Rackham and we found them in a very chaotic status. Some pieces are missing; some others incomplete and we have to archive and catalogue in a proper manner. This is time consuming and we are not that many at Legacy Miniatures.
After wave 2 and wave 3 we understood there is no reason to re-release existing products. We will limit the release to new pieces or to limited edition ones.
When we will have finally sorted out the catalogue, we will sit down with our distribution partner CMON and we will decide what is the best way to relaunch the game. Again it is not an easy call because it is a huge investment and we have to do in the right way.
These pieces now on sale will never be recasted in this manner and quality, hence customers who bought them could be sure of the uniqueness of their acquisition.
The Cynwall Dragon will be sold at what we consider the right market price after we looked into similar pieces. No doubt, it will be expensive, but again we don’t think we will be able to produce many of them.
Thanks to all of you for your patience, critics and we hope that we will be able in the future months to fulfil your expectations.
Again if you have to blame someone it is us.
Regards
Legacy Miniatures
I have my own opinion about the Legacy project, and will save sharing my thoughts on the range for a later date. In the meantime, I want to address the “revelation” that Legacy resin models are made in China, and the surprise many customers expressed upon learning this.
Legacy Miniatures is owned and operated by Dust Game Ltd, the makers of Dust Tactics. I’m not sure how the corporate structuring works, but Dust Game Ltd is directly tied to an older company, Dust Models, which makes a variety of products based on the Dust universe, including comics books, scale models, modeling guides, etc. Both Dust Models and Dust Game are the brainchild of none other than Paolo Parente, who, as director, oversees Dust Studio, the creative team that brings the Dust world to life. Paolo, and much of his team, were central players at Rackham, so it’s no surprise that they were able to secure licensing agreements with Cyanide Studios (owners of the Rackham IP) and CoolMiniOrNot (distributors) to bring the Legacy Miniatures project to fruition.
Legacy Miniatures manufactures their resin models in China (Hong Kong), because Dust Studio has been based there for years. From what I recall, Paolo started Dust as a side project in the early 2000s, but had been kicking around ideas about the universe long before that. With a foothold already established in China to make plastic model kits for Dust Models, Paolo had the right connections to help his employer (Rackham) make their transition to prepainted plastic: all of the Age of Rag’narok plastic models were made in China, specifically by Cathay Plastic Factory Ltd.
A little known fact–even though it’s written on box!–is that the Rackham Legends models were made in China, too. If you own any of these models, you know they are of very high quality with little or no flash from the molding process. My hunch is that for these first releases of Legacy models, Dust Game repeated the manufacturing process used for the Legend models, and may even have commissioned the same manufacturer.
Given the location of their operations, established business connections, targeted production levels, quality concerns, and associated costs (packaging, for example), it was a logical choice for Dust Game to produce their models in China. Mind you, I’m not here to defend or criticize their decision to operate out of China; I just wanted to provide an explanation as to why.
