The adage says “Before you judge a man, walk a mile in his shoes”. And I have to say that there is no way that I would have wanted to be in Matt Sprange’s shoes for the last few weeks. Mongoose Publishing has been heavily promoting their new miniature game Battlefield Evolution and the prepainted miniatures that the game uses. It turns out that the images they have posted on their site for the last few months weren’t the same quality as the shipping models.

Update: Unfortunately the images used in this article were removed from Imageshack.

You don’t really need to look at the photos too hard to determine that they are not even close to the quality of the miniatures that Mongoose has been using to promote the game for the last few months. Reaction to the images was to be expected as fans on the Mongoose Forums, and elsewhere, wondered what the hell happened. Matt Sprange then posted a genuinely shocked response to the models on the Mongoose Forum

There is certainly an error somewhere here, and I have already spent much of the morning trying to track it down. I hope to be able to give you all a full accounting of what has happened, and our planned resolution, as soon as possible. Speaking personally, I don’t intend for these models to go on sale

The problem is, of course, that the models had almost certainly already shipped and there wasn’t really anything Matt or Mongoose could do about it. And Matt’s “I don’t intend for these models to go on sale” comment spent the better part of a week and a half haunting him.

After some work Matt then posted a full response to the issue on their Forum. A response that was quite more prepared than his original comment.

Now there are several ways to view this issue and the simplest, and most common on the web, is that Mongoose Publishing is just trying to pull a fast one on their customers. I think that this is not the case. If you are familiar with the history of the creation and development of modern painted plastic miniatures you will be aware of more than a few similar cases happening for other companies that sell these types of figures. My guess is that Mongoose was given samples that did not represent either the plastic moulding quality or the painting quality of the final product and that no one at Mongoose checked to make sure that the final product matched the samples.

Mongoose has already offered to refund any preorders people made with them but its difficult to see how the range can be rescued now. And its not difficult to understand why Matt and Mongoose are now praising miniatures that Matt originally said he didn’t intend to sell. He doesn’t really have much of a choice. The first wave of product was shipped when this issue developed and Mongoose has to promote the produce if only because they have a ton of it in channels now and need to sell it.

How much of that they need to sell is an interesting question though. Mongoose recently posted a top 20 list of their most popular products of 2006. What is interesting to note is that there is only a single miniature release in that list. There are three Starship Trooper army books but only one Starship Troopers miniature release. The rest of the top 20 list is predominantly RPG products. So while we might view Mongoose as a wargames and miniatures company the fact of the matter is that the vast majority of its sales and funds are in creating and selling RPG products. To put this into perspective, Matt Sprange often talks about the popularity of the Babylon 5: A Call to Arms miniature game and yet that game is only #15 on their list.

None of which changes the fact that I wouldn’t have wanted to trade places with Matt Sprange even if Battlefield Evolution isn’t as important a factor in his companies sales as we wargames might think it is.