Frown Town for Privateer Releases

[Ian Mulligan]

From Privateer's site:

Since the release of Mk II, both WARMACHINE and HORDES have seen an explosive amount of growth that has created an unprecedented demand for these award-winning miniatures games. In response, Privateer Press has been steadily increasing production staff and facilities. However, even with these measures in place, the tremendous popularity of the games has continued to outpace our ability to produce them.

With demand continuing to remain at record levels, Privateer Press has decided to delay August releases to give both our production facility and our distribution channels time to get closer to total back order fulfillment.

Privateer Press would like to thank everyone who has helped make Mk II such an amazing success. We remain committed to producing the best entertainment experiences for discerning audiences.

Luckily, a lot of the really good stuff is out mid July at the latest.

[Imp]

i think one of the issues is PP keeping making and turning out new models all the time which is great and keeps the game from getting stale with army builds, but it hurts them in this factor of stretching their production of minis too thin.

[Benjamin]

It's surely better news than, "We're raising our prices! Again!"

[Rhys]

until they realize that raising prices will bring demand to a more manageable level. PP won't be this active and competitive forever, this aggressive small business mentality will fade with time. remember, even GW used to provide cardboard cutouts of units so you could make sure the rules weren't crap before taking the plunge on an army.

[jonm]

What bugs me most with PP is the turn-around time for anything plastic. I can't imagine anything metal not being out by December, but we're going to be waiting a long-ass time for the new plastic heavy kits. Sure they has the prototypes at Lock 'N Load that were prepped and ready to go into production, but that doesn't mean anything.

Think about this one, Khador Bombardiers were introduced in the army's Forces book March 2010. The models are finally being released in September 2011. The curveball is that pictures of them are featured in Wrath, which I would assume went to the printers around January/February of this year at the latest. That means they existed in some capacity late last year when the book was being designed. It isn't even a fluke either; consider the plastic light jacks for all the factions (14-21 months for most).

I'm sure PP's explanation regarding its problems with their Chinese manufacturer is true, however they're still responsible for their own business practices (i.e. who they go into business with, release schedule, PR, etc). An 18+ month turn-around time - with no press release explaining things from the company - is total bullshit.

I never thought I'd say it, but this company might be in serious need of some kind of hostile corporate takeover.

[DragonKnight]

Not to defend something I know nothing about...but how about this?

what if the process to make one model is entirely different than manufacturing thousands?  This would be the reason behind you seeing a few here and there, perhaps those are "hand made" from green stuff as prototype.

Where as when they try to mass produce them they run into production issues as they say.

just a thought!

[jonm]

Joel, regardless of the material being used they're mass producing every model in their catalog.

I believe the plastics story, but I hold them accountable because they a) should have known who they were doing business with and that this company would push their orders back regularly in favor of more lucractive ones. b) They made no effort to reach out to retailers and a community wondering where the hell their shit is. It will have taken 18 months for Bombardiers to drop and they've made no effort to smooth things over with their customers. That's pretty weak.

When it comes to the metal figures, it's equally silly. They don't have enough casters. Since MKII dropped demand has steadily gone up. Did they seriously not notice that more people were ordering more stuff more often? Compound that weakness with their admitted refusal to only hire full time employees. That seems like a bad move. They claim that it takes a while to train a person to competently pour the metal into the molds. Well, their supply has been crippled for at least a year now. I can't believe there's a 12 month training period for metal pouring. Sorry. No sale.

These problems only got worse too as they continued to crank out two new rulebooks and 10 Forces books (with accompanying figures) and a new faction in just over a year. Talk about over-extending yourself. That's the significance of this release. After being dicks for so long they finally had to admit they dropped the ball.

[Chase]

It sucks that they're out of Wrath books too. 

Hopefully the second print run hits the distributors soon.

[Imp]

seems they posted another longer version today

Since the release of the second edition of its award-winning tabletop miniatures games WARMACHINE and HORDES, Privateer Press has seen explosive growth among its player communities worldwide. The excitement generated by our games has never been higher, and demand has quickly outpaced our production ability. In response, we have expanded our efforts to make our products as easily available as possible.

While Privateer has continued to supply new releases on time, fulfilling the high volume of back orders can require substantial wait times. In an attempt to produce and ship orders faster, over the last year we have more than doubled the size of our production staff, significantly expanded our manufacturing capabilities to include an all-new resin casting department, and converted more of our line to plastic. These efforts have significantly increased our production ability, and we are now shipping record-breaking amounts of product from our Bellevue facility.

Additionally, Privateer recently announced that we will push back our new releases that had been slated for August in order to concentrate on filling back orders. With the expected surge in demand that usually accompanies our summer convention efforts, Privateer will also offer only limited new releases for the months of October and December to further increase the amount of back order fulfillment.

Finally, to better support players we will be implementing a new order system this fall that will ensure the core items for every faction will be readily available. The new order system will provide faster fulfillment on the essential products for both WARMACHINE and HORDES, so players will have access to everything they need to build a complete army and begin playing with their new faction right away. Items that are not part of the core list will continue to be available but will be subject to longer fulfillment times until our manufacturing capacity can be expanded to handle the high demand.

Privateer Press will continue to focus every effort toward improving the rate of our back order fulfillment. We thank you for your patience as we continue to support our rapidly growing WARMACHINE and HORDES communities around the world.

LINK HERE