simple but goofy question

[JPArbiter]

okay, so this is one for the ages.  Iron Wind Metals has so many freaking battletech molds they had to rent out a storage locker for a select number of them, and thus we have the archives.

I was perusing some of the mechs in the archives and found something... interesting.  we have now four sculpts of the Atlas of various Vintages (counting the atlas II) an entire line of Clan Omnimech Minis, and two failed Blood Asp's before the brilliance of this most recent retry.  this makes me wonder why Iron Wind doesn't just destroy/dispose of some of those drastically older, clearly out of date molds and discontinue offering them even in archive.

I know I can not speak for everyone but I certainly will not miss the minuscule 20-607 Daishi as long as we have the big beefy 20-607RE Raishi lying around.

it is a moot question anyway since Ironwind makes their own policies, and are subject to their agreements with CGL, but it was food for thought.

[Dr Lucky]

I suspect they still sell figures made from those molds because some people buy them.  There are probably people out there who have extensive collections of the old molds and would prefer to buy figures that match, rather than the more recent sculpts.  I know it isn't exactly the same thing but I still usually buy the 20-681 Longbow mold instead of the newer 20-220 mold.
If the archive price system is working for them to keep those molds around, they probably have no financial incentive to change things.

[JPArbiter]

and that is fair enough, on a cursorily count there is only 25-30 molds where there is a newer updated mini in production, so it won't exactly save anything monetarily.  if we get to things like killing the multi part grasshoppers and cyclopses and stick to the single piece molds in clamshells, that would boost the number of redundancies for sure, but those are not in archive.

like I said I have no emotional investment one way or another, I was just curious.

[Cyc]

Big fan of older Atlases, newer resculpts are far too skinny IMO, but even I wonder why older stuff isn't discontinued entirely.

[Dave Talley]

face it,
its because there are lots of us geeks who will want specifically that
smaller Daishi because it completes a collection of that group

unlike most companies IWM has bent over backwards to
accomidate all of us, if they had the cash and space my advice would be cast up
several runs of each of the archive molds just to have stock on hand, dont tell
us and still charge the archive fee tho, otherwise they be swamped in requests for
'when is such and such gonna be cast so I can avoid the archive fee?'