I saw, and held, my first high quality resin mini by gw. It is much better than their finecast. Or, they improved the formula of the finecast. Whatever they did from the lotr finecast era to the hobbit high quality resin era, the change was good.

Is there more than a name change...?

from what I know they jus improved the casting progress and there is no other new material involved..
still does no beat metal, no even in price as was said........

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prov. 27:17

I haven't had any newer Resin miniatures in my hand yet, but I guess they will at least have changed the casting progress compared to the LotR miniatures. For the LotR miniatures they used the old metal spin casting moulds and just poured resin instead of metal in them.
Classical resin casting such as Forgeworld is done with different moulds. As they released new miniatures it would only make sense that they made different moulds.
Nevertheless I have heard before that the material has changed to. More like Forgeworlds resin.

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I'll bet that was the change. Slowly filtering out the old moulds. I wish they would go all plastic and stop with the resin thing. Gw makes good plastics. They should capitalize on that. Not complaining, just commenting.

They are all plastic, with the exception of SBG. Or at least moving to all plastic - no new finecast releases for any system for at least a year or two now. Except us, for obvious reasons. The steel moulds for plastic sprues are very expensive upfront - for 40k and WFB, these moulds pay for themselves either fairly swiftly, or are in use for so long that it evens out anyway.

Personally I've just noticed better QC with the 'resin'. It's still the same soft, rubbery resin - and nothing like actual high quality resin, or just decent resin, such as what Forge World use. They're just better at casting it, mostly, and better at designing minis for it. If there's been a chemical change, I can't see it being a very severe one. I think they dropped the 'finecast' label (on most releases) mostly because of how that particular branding had become toxic.

I mean all plastic and no resin. They make great plastic minis, why spoil it and create resin minis?

Because my guess is the plastic molds will be more expensive? But they might sell more when they use plastic, I've read quite a many times how finecast is putting people off from buying.

I have to say, being used to high quality resin, I pretty much felt like 'that's it?' when I got my first fine cast figueres, and I think those are from the newer range, because they were hobbit figueres.
I quite love how details turn out on them though, but somehow I find them the hardest material to paint with.

I'm a great fan of the plastic GW is using currently, it's nicely hard plastic and packs loads of details too. And I love like the warhammer fantasy kits how they easily fit in spare parts of options to make several kinds of troops out of one box. Now, if they would be doing that for the Hobbit range, I would be quite happy.

Because plastic is expensive, and resin is cheap.

Once SBG is gone, their WFB and 40k resins (not massive amounts these days to start with, mostly characters I think) will slowly be replaced by plastic. They no longer produce new resin models, except for us because we don't sell enough to justify the plastic costs - they tried going heavily plastic with AUJ and it didn't work out. This isn't 40k or WFB where it doesn't matter too much because the slow sellers earn a profit after several years, and then just don't receive an update - Hobbit and SBG are time limited by their license agreements. It would appear that the sales of AUJs plastics indicated that it was unlikely to be a profitable decision to go all plastic, within the time left before their licenses expire. They still manufacture the resin minis they already have for WFB and 40k because otherwise it'd leave voids in the range, and it takes time to fill those voids - so there's no point getting rid of finecast space-whatsits-from-space until the plastic is ready.

The "they'd sell more with plastic" argument doesn't really work, because of AUJ. It didn't do well enough. Even if this community went balls to the wall to support the plastics - there aren't enough of us. The DoS Sourcebook sold around a hundred copies - evidence of a rapidly dwindling market (and that release was mostly plastic too - it was predominantly Mirkwood stuff made for Movie 1 back in the two film days).

Those words"ring" true

Low sales still dont justify this madness of clampacks with 3 resin models.
I personally never had any serious problem with finecast/resin and i think the problem to most people lies to the price rather the material.
If GW did not want to invest plastic moulds for the hobbit they could have release resin sets of 10 warriors to a price of 25-30 gbp instead of this madness with packs of 3. It is not so much the material but the marketing they fail at.
The only logic to their steps right now (decreasing the amount of models and increasing their price with every release) according to the hobbit would be to justify the price on later releases on plastic models.
For example when AUJ came out everyone whined about the price increase on the plastic sets, right now the whine is on the 3 pack resin models and everyone is praying they will release plastics in the price of AUJ sets. But i really doubt GW managers think this way

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From their point of view it does, but the reasons why their expected income didn't justify their expenses are simple.

1)The damn prohibitive starting prices, £75 for the starter set £50 for a rule book, both of these items are between £20 to £30 too expensive to be worth getting in the first place, in my local GW, they still have the limited edition escape from goblin town, the plastic box sets of grimhammers is £5 too expensive, had the stuff been at the old lotr box prices even after the halving of the box sizes I would have bought several boxes, the eagles are the only cost effective thing to buy right now.

2) The Hobbit, just isn't anywhere near as cool as LotR, therefore less people to reel in

3) no advertising

So you see in comparison to LotR the hobbit has been a big flop

Personally I have bought virtually nothing from the hobbit range as I cannot justify the cost to myself, there are things that I would love to have but I really don't like finecast (metal is actually worth something), and the price is just too high, that said I have been sculpting my own hobbit minis and that is fun.

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I agree, more or less.

I wasn't defending their current model, just explaining it. They're still idiots who charge three times too much for a terrible quality bendy resin, and who honestly expected the Hobbit to reach the cultural and merchandising peaks of the LotR trilogy and draw new players in. They priced a game that would have seen their business grow at the same price as 40k and WFB, and then failed to market it in way, even refusing to give it WD coverage.

This wasn't malice - trying to kill SBG amd get the new recruits on 40k - it was stupidity because they genuinely think that's all they need to do to support a game. And, when their mistakes comes back to bite them in the back, rather than trying to fix the core problem, they do everythhing in their power to make it work no matter the cost. The world has changed under their feet, but rather than reconsidering their steps, they keep tripping up.

At the end of the day, GW is a publicly traded company. Therefore, regardless of our opinions, they *must* turn a profit (for the investors), and if that means killing lotr and creating odd 3 pack resin clams for Hobbit, while at the same time expanding their money making line (40k). Then that is what they have to do.

To be honest, the best way to sway GW's opinion and actions against the sbg would be to buy stock in their company. Imagine, every member of our forum purchasing a few shares of stock then sending them a letter from their investors demanding more sbg.