I will soon be doing a prototype plastic parts service, in hopes that I can do it cheaper...
I would like to know what it currently costs everyone to make custom plastic parts for their games, from the size of a finger nail to the size of a basketball. I've looked into plastic molding and its usualy 8000$ or so just to make molds or tools to make the parts... and you usualy hve to do 10,000... or so.. prototyping resin models are fragile etc.. and are still expensive.
So, what if I supplied plastic figures, models, tokens... at a lower price? how low would I have to go to make it worth your purchase? and how high can I go to make me able to afford to do this. It is not as low cost as I had expected in another post on here, however I do think its still the lowest cost way to get a full game of plastic pieces...
I need the machine for my custom game alone, having over 600-1000 plastic parts!!! LOL... once assembled there are less parts to worry about tho :).
So if I charged about 50$ an hour for build time... would that be decent? I could prolly make a monopoly set of plastic parts (the thimbols and stuff), in about an hour or less.
If there is high interest in this, I already have ways to get funding I just need to show them that I can pay off the loan fast... so if 50% of my machine time is for game parts.. and the other 50% is my other projects I should be able to pay it off even faster than they want me too give me spare time etc...
blah im rambling lol... any way just let me know how much it costs to make your average prototype parts, and I will try to do it cheaper..
Well let me ask it this way...
Is $1-$10 per piece depending on size... worth it? (plus shipping obviously) - and large lots of pieces again would be cheaper it would be better to make a whole bunch of monopoly houses, rather then just one... but those are so simple u could use glass stones or something... its just a counter.
In the case of my game, the game prototype REQUIRES plastic parts, or it just wont pull off the feel, or functionality.. it would be too complex to use cardboard pieces (when I show the game on here it will make sense).
In some cases they might want a tank shaped piece or a barbarian who knows...
So I do see needs for plastic parts...
in some cases the prototype can be sent off to be investment cast into a brass or pewter version... (any one want custom monopoly tokens? ;) )