Get The Lead Out!

Plastics.

My conclusion when I last visited this topic in the 2020 survey (see One Word: Plastics) was that there was a great future in plastics.  The 2020 showed that hard plastic figures were the most preferred figure material.  For me, the 2020 result was both a curiosity and a shock given my preference toward metal figures.

Did the 2022 survey reinforce the 2020 tendency of plastic figures taking the top spot in figure material preference or was the 2020 survey result a curious blip?  The 2022 results suggest that hard plastic figures continue to gain popularity.  Even I am yielding, somewhat, to hard plastic figures for at least one collection. 

What does the 2022 survey show for wargamer preference in figure material?

First Choice in Figure Material

When all survey respondents ranked their top choice in figure material, Hard Plastic came solidly into the top place.  For the 10,502 respondents answering this question, Hard Plastics garnered almost 54% of all of the responses as top choice.   Metals, coming in at a distant second place captured about 32% of the responses.  All other materials saw low single digit percentages.  To my untrained, metal-centric eye, the dominance of Hard Plastics as the preferred material still astonishes me.  Hard Plastics and Metals capture nearly 86% of all respondents' favorite material. 

Table 1

In an attempt to understand the drivers of these numbers, let's break these totals down by a selection of attributes.

Material Preference by Primary Interest

When responses are stratified by a wargamer's Primary Interest (see Figure 1), a wide chasm emerges.  68.3% of respondents classifying themselves as primarily Fantasy/Sci-Fi wargamers choose Hard Plastics as their first choice in material.  Metals is a very distant second at 9.8%.  A surprise?

For Historical gamers, Metals as a first choice in material dominate at 58.7% with Hard Plastics coming in second at 32.4%.  Historical wargamers still seem to prefer metal figures over anything else.  For the Mixed category, Hard Plastics are still first choice in 57.6% of responses with Metals in second place at 28.6%.    

Figure 1

Material Preference by Age Group

When breaking down material preference by Age Group, what does the survey show?

Figure 2 illustrates that the younger age cohorts heavily favor Hard Plastics.  The general tendency is that Metals preference increases with age at the expesne of all other materials.  Even in the 61+ age group, though, Hard Plastics are the first choice for almost 30% of the respondents.  Seems that the Hard Plastics category has a solid foothold across all age cohorts.  Notice that the youngest age cohort chooses Paper as first choice in about 13% of responses.

Figure 2

Material Preference by Collection Size

When one considers the expected tendency when examining the effect of Collection Size on Material Preference, what is a reasonable conclusion?  A reasonable conclusion might hold that older wargamers would tend to have larger collections and that older age cohorts may have come into the hobby when metal figures were more prominent than hard plastic figures.  Large collections take many years to accumulate.  As seen in prior year analyses, surveys suggests that older wargamers tend toward historicals and fighting big battles.  Larger collections, therefore, ought to tend toward metals.   

Figure 3

Do the 2022 results support those inferences? Yes, they do. 

The percentage of respondents choosing metal figures as a top choice increases as collection size increases.

Do the effects of Primary Interest, Age Group, and Collection Size upon Material Preference match your experience or intuition?

Now, there are other factors or attributes captured in the survey that could be brought into this analysis to extend the study.  What effects do figure scale, wargaming period, game size, game type, hobby spend, and gamer location have on material preference? What do you think the effect of these attributes have on material preference? Any? 

I leave those analyses for another time but would enjoy reading your thoughts on Material Preference and the drivers of this choice for you.