Comment by pjc50
2 months ago
Interesting that this charts by _sets_, not total production volume.
I wonder what the market is like. I'm vaguely aware of Warhammer as a hobby, that's adjacent enough to my social media that I can "see" it, but not people buying miniatures. Does it sit adjacent to railway modelling? Are people making dioramas of Waterloo still?
.. a quick check reveals that OO is 1:76, so they wouldn't quite be right.
There are many 1:76 sets as well, even if 1:72 is more common.
Anecdotally, wargamers do not use those minis much. Some older gamers started out with playing more or less improvised wargames using 1:72 (mainly Airfix) figures in the 1960's or so, or playing games like Fewtherstone's wargames perhaps, but it is rare to see them now. Historical minis as a whole are less common now, but those that still play either use metal figures or figures from more wargame-specific companies (usually using more common game scales like 10mm, 15mm, or 28mm).
Most 1:72 ranges seen on that site (that I spent many hours on) are not that great for gaming. Lots of useless poses that are more for dioramas (or as kids toys maybe?). For gaming you need more just simple infantry walking or firing in some kind of good combat pose, but you often only get a handful of those in a set of 40+ figures, so it does not become very cost effective. Many poses look good, but not what you probably want to build armies for a tabletop.
1:76 is a very popular scale for model railways in the UK, so I wonder if they design figures for that audience, then paint them in fatigues to expand the market range.
The US preferred 1:87 historically. English 1:76 and American 1:87 trains run on the same size track, but the English models are typically built slightly over-size because their smaller bodies wouldn't fit a good motor easily.
This site isn't about Warhammer, that's an entirely separate hobby. Warhammer figures are much larger (around 1:56, but the characters are mostly superhumans and monsters, so in practice the figures are much larger) and there's more emphasis on stuff like painting and competitive play than diorama or realism.
This site is about "historic" stuff only. No Fantasy or SciFi, thus no Warhammer.
If you want to this historic wargaming hobby in action: https://www.youtube.com/@LittleWarsTV
1:72 means to shrink 6 ft into 1 inch.
That bugged me too; one set that sold a million copies in the 1950s counts for dramatically less than 100 sets that each sell ten thousand copies in 2007, even if they're precisely the same number of soldiers.
Of course the chart is bunk. It represents variety, not volume.