Spartan Games cease trading

Started by Fenton, 25 August 2017, 05:00:33 PM

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Leon

It'll be interesting to see if any of these companies continue under new ownership or simply disappear.  I'd imagine that Spartan is too big for the majority of people to buy, so you'd need one of the other major players to step in and buy them up.  Tor have got a nice little range so there should be several suitors looking at those you'd think.  Steel Fist have got some fantastic sculpts but the asking price I've heard on the grapevine is crazy, unless he's got some solid sales numbers to back it up.
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Lord Kermit of Birkenhead

MMS are also shutting down, owner is retiring. He would sell, but is asking far too higher price for it. Be interesting to know how much Skytrex charged for the stuff they sold off.

IanS

PS - Shaun from S&S valued his range at over £1,000,000, but I suspect that was very tongue in cheek.
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Orcs

Quote from: ianrs54 on 26 August 2017, 01:13:53 PM
MMS are also shutting down, owner is retiring. He would sell, but is asking far too higher price for it. Be interesting to know how much Skytrex charged for the stuff they sold off.

IanS

PS - Shaun from S&S valued his range at over £1,000,000, but I suspect that was very tongue in cheek.

MMS were lovely kits, very detailed. I think the wargames market has gone away from fiddley detailed kits to fast build ones such as those by Armourfast and Plastic Soldier company.  The moulding process now produce muc more detailed kits without all the fiddley bits to put together. that's not to dtreacty from the quality of MMS kits just that most wargamers do not want detailed kits with fragile parts  - they want gaming pieces
The cynics are right nine times out of ten. -Mencken, H. L.

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Leon

Skytrex was priced at £200,000 with a turnover of just under £300,000.  They held an absolute ton of stock as well, must have been over 12 months worth just sitting there.

They ended up breaking the ranges down and trying to sell them separately instead, but even then only a few sold.  We looked at the 1/144th WWI planes ourselves, which were priced at £17,000 I think, but they had no sales info for the range and they were old moulds that needed replacing.  With 58 planes in the range, we could have had new models made and moulded for about half that price so it just wasn't viable.  
www.pendraken.co.uk - Now home to over 7000 products, including 4500 items for 10mm wargaming, plus MDF bases, Battlescale buildings, I-94 decals, Litko Gaming Aids, Militia Miniatures, Raiden Miniatures 1/285th aircraft, Red Vectors MDF products, Vallejo paints and much, much more!

Lord Kermit of Birkenhead

Orcs - if you have ever tried to assemble a Battlefront Flak 36 - the single 37 - you'll know your assertion is only partially correct, still cant see how the shield fits.

Thanks Leon, was interested for personal reasons.

IanS
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Raider4

Quote from: AndyT on 25 August 2017, 08:40:54 PM
Spartan always seemed to be focusing on "the next game" rather than finishing what they had started . . .

To be fair, that sounds like quite a few companies over the years. And yes, Mongoose, I am looking at you . . .

Cheers, Martyn
--

Steve J

A friend of mine ran his own successful military modelling range for many years, before being fore closed on by the bank in the mid-90's despite being solvent; they simply called in their loan. Years later he re-started part time, along side his day job. After a couple of years he shut it down, as he was simply tired of gettng home at night and then having to sort out and pack orders. Even doing that he was earning less than the minmum wage, more like pin money in fact. I think it is very hard, if not impossible, to go from the part time cottage level operation to one that will pay a living wage on a full time basis. Looking at the market, there appear to be (well to me at least) lots of niche operations with a limited range and appeal to the wider wargaming community. Frankly I doubt their long term durability, but I wish them well.


Orcs

Quote from: ianrs54 on 26 August 2017, 02:45:21 PM
Orcs - if you have ever tried to assemble a Battlefront Flak 36 - the single 37 - you'll know your assertion is only partially correct, still cant see how the shield fits.

Thanks Leon, was interested for personal reasons.

IanS

No I have never played WW2 at 28mm, as I have loads of kit in 20mm.  So I do not intend to start
The cynics are right nine times out of ten. -Mencken, H. L.

Life is not a matter of holding good cards, but of playing a poor hand well. - Robert Louis Stevenson

Lord Kermit of Birkenhead

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toxicpixie

Shows you how much Orcs cares about that, there :D

Battlefront name recognition zero, Orcs one :D
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KTravlos

I always thought Spartan Games made a mistake in going for their own scale for their games. I understood the logic, but when part of your line-up was targeted at people who used to play other games (Battlefleet Gothic and ManoWar), making your figures at a scale that is different than the scale used in those games seemed to me like restricting it potential clientele. Same goes for DW. Why not try to get all the people playing Aeronef by making your game scale-compatible? Dystopian Legions made no sense scale wise. To put it simply in trying to create a "locked" clientele, I think Spartan missed a lot of potential costumers (leaving out my pet peeve that the scales they chose severely limited how much their games could be enjoyed by people with space issues). Don't get me wrong. Their figures were works of arts, and I appreciate their championing of resin. The worlds they created had potential. But I feel they were hobbled from the start.

I mean at a very basic why did Spartan Games fail when Aeronef is still around?

Orcs

Quote from: toxicpixie on 28 August 2017, 08:52:02 AM
Shows you how much Orcs cares about that, there :D

Battlefront name recognition zero, Orcs one :D

Whoops got confused with Bolt Action stuff   :-[
The cynics are right nine times out of ten. -Mencken, H. L.

Life is not a matter of holding good cards, but of playing a poor hand well. - Robert Louis Stevenson

Ithoriel

Quote from: KTravlos on 28 August 2017, 09:11:33 AM
Their figures were works of arts, and I appreciate their championing of resin. The worlds they created had potential. But I feel they were hobbled from the start.

As an inveterate converter of minis I loathe resin figures with a passion!
There are 100 types of people in the world, those who understand binary and those who can work from incomplete data

Duke Speedy of Leighton



I mean at a very basic why did Spartan Games fail when Aeronef is still around?

Because Brigade are two blokes on a shed who eat cake... for them it's a part time effort, and they only expand when they can see a range (they only have five ranges and they're pretty comprehensive on their coverage of those too), plus Aeronef is a fairly cheap buy in, £30 gets you a fleet and the PDF of the rules (Imperial Skies is more expensive, but it has higher production values), you only need about ten to a dozen figures per side.
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toxicpixie

Tbh I prefer Brigades approach to the aesthetics of Victorian sci-fi, the cleaner more historical lines look better to my eye than the pseudo-GW High Spikey approach Spartan mostly took.

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