Honestly, knowing they can produce these parts at these prices and that their figures are built to be dismantled and kitbashed but they make it hard enough to get spare parts that someone can break apart a single knight figure and resell every single piece of the body for $20 each is like... what is this business model? They could LEGO this shit if they wanted to, just put a parts library online or sell it through BBTS or whatever.
It's a numbers game. I'm guessing they just haven't hit the economic threshold to be able to justify investing in the additional jobs and infrastructure an operation like that would require.
Resellers on eBay might be able to sell spare parts for $12-20, but I think the 4H would have to lower those prices to like $5-8 per part to really motivate their customers and that's a pretty small sale for the time and cost it would take to pack and ship something. In order to be cost-effective at those low prices, they'd probably have to utilize cheaper Chinese labor at the factory to ship out parts like that. That might have been workable under Biden, but President Jackass' unpredictability makes overseas investments like that more risky.
We don't know the size of the Horsemen's actual market, but this Kickstarter reaching roughly 3,500 backers provides some kind of benchmark from which to guage the market because as we've pointed out a lot this last month, this Kickstarter was clearly all about the toys and was unlikely to bring in many TTRPG fans who weren't already 4H collectors. Even if we generously double that market, that's still only 7,000 4H collectors out there.
Of those assumed 7,000 Legions collectors, I'd be curious to know what percentage of them really do much popping and swapping. The whole reason I collect both Mythic and Cosmic Legions is because of their modular design, but I'm old enough to know my tastes aren't most people's tastes. I remember there was a user on The Fwoosh who scolded the rest of us for popping and swapping our Legions figures because we were disrespecting the creative thought and effort that went into creating that unnamed Silver Knight in the first place. If the Reddit community for Legions is any kind of indicative microcosm, I'd bet fewer than half of all Legions collectors would ever buy spare parts for swapping. So now we're back down to those dedicated 3-4,000 collectors buying $5-8 parts at all, let alone with consistency. Unfortunately, that juice just isn't worth the squeeze, and I say that as someone who buys a lot of overpriced Legions parts on eBay.
