For my sins, my day job is doing 3D printed models. The company I sell my files/models through is sponsoring a show and want to promote pre-painted models. Something I'm not really able to do (even if I was willing), but it made me wonder. While for stuff like RPG figures (most of said companies little companies), I can sort of see benefit for getting pre-painted if you only want one or two and don't really want to paint, on the wargames side, it had been significantly my impression that that the bare majority of wargamers consider painting/collecting to be the main thrust of the hobby, rather than actually playing. (If I believe one impromptu survey, it might be around 50%, possibly even higher.)
So, out of pure curiousity, if in some hypothetical future, CGL was able to offer pre-coloured models (in whatever form that might take, be it painted plastics or 3D colour-prints or whatever), would that hold any appeal?
As an addendum question, I today recieved an email regarding that sample model, that it was going to cost $100[1] to have done (of which I would have had to have paid half). Bearing mind this model is basically the size of a battlemech. (Somewhere in the volume of a medium mech, I'd say, certainly appreciably smaller than the plastic Diashi from the Alpha Strike set that I compared it to.)
To to all of you who said yes, would that answer still be "yes" if the price was, lowballing it horrendously, twice as much as a regular model? Three times? Five? Twenty? (Which is in the order of how much more expense $100 is than what I estimate the price will be when I put it up for sale, which will be about £4 in resin.)
This is just pure curiousity, especially since far more people said yes than I had expected, with in general the wargaming market seeming to be more painter-focussed.
I'm sure that last one is very clearly bonkers, but I'm curious to see where people's boundaries lies now that I have at least my own point of reference.
(To whit, at last as far as my own stuff goes, I am absolutely NOT going to look at 3D colour printing!)
I have, of course, no clue about how much it costs CGL do do colour prints (hell, the replies on this thread saying they were doing some was in fact news to me); they are, of course, about... six or seven orders of magnitude bigger than me and have a lot more doors they can try to open! (If they can find somewhere that means the cost (to them and us) is much closer to the unpainted cost, I wish them the best of luck!)
[1]Edit: In fairness, the follow-up email reminded me that also is the cost for getting the digital painting done, which would be relatively negigable for someone doing it for, like CGL for thousands/tens of thousands of units per paint job, so it for CGL it wouldn't be like for me!
