I was sorry to see this news although never really played their stuff and I have to wonder about halo licence costs and if enough comp gamers where even bothered to make it worth while . as a none halo gamer but a space navel gamer , I was never even tempted (plus I prefer a game to have 4 clear factions min ) its odd that the halo stuff its not motioned in the statement ?
They wouldn't have mentioned Halo because they were just licensing the IP and they probably have no control over anything that happens to it. They probably also, likely thanks to lawyers, did not want to even imply there was any problems at all with the HALO IP. Such as having someone search for HALO and seeing a business closing notice and think the HALO IP is dying.
There is a very good chance the HALO IP hurt them. It was a gamble because the IP has a lot of potential value but capitalizing on that value is a big unknown. The biggest issue there is that HALO used quite a bit of plastics and plastics have a very high start-up cost and need to move a lot of units before they pay for those up-front costs. Until they sell X units they aren't actually making any money, they're just loosing less with each sale. I don't know the costs exactly, but I've done some research on it previously and the mould production costs on things that size are probably in the $20k-50k range. The main point though is that you have to move a lot of models before you've even paid off the moulds. And if a retailer is selling the product for $40 there is a good chance Spartan gets about $10 of that (distributor marks up about 100% to $20, and retailer marks up 100% on top of that to hit $40). And since they are made out of house, Spartan probably keeps about $5 and pays the person casting it $5. But even at $10 per model and a $10k mould cost it takes 1000 models sold to even break even.
Which is of course why only really big companies tend to make much in plastic. The production costs go down as well as the original mould design costs, but the machinery to even start that is a huge chunk of money too.
Resin, and metal, have very low mould costs, but the cost of each casting is higher, so it is a lot more practical for low volume sales where you have fewer units to cover the start-up costs.
If it costs you $3 worth of resin to cast a model or $0.50 worth of plastic you can clearly see the savings, $2.50 per model cast. But a $10k mould vs a $100 mould means you've got to sell 3960 models before you realize the savings.
But the other side of resin is that you can only go so big with a model before the cost really hurts you. The cube-square law says that as you double in size (length x width) you've quadrupled the volume. So a 2" by 0.5" ship might cost $1 in resign, but a 4"x1" ship costs $4 and 8"x2" model (like the ice maiden) would cost $16. And while the Ice Maiden is a very large chunk of resin, it is not all that big by plastic model standards (see all of the plastic models for sale at a place like Walmart). So you can see why the largest models in HALO are almost impossible to make in resin.
I would note that many of my numbers were made up just to illustrate the point, they are probably "in the general ballpark" based on the research I've done, but it should be clear from the numbers that even small changes would make a big difference in the final math.
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