Dragon Models is leaving kit production to focus on IP, 3D data and licensing. Its tooling has been sold to Zimi Model, which will develop, produce and sell the kits under a new brand: DRAMi (DRAgon + ziMi). Cyber-Hobby, Dragon's web-exclusive label, effectively winds down with the parent. This is not "Dragon is dead"; it's the catalogue changing hands. The open questions are pricing and whether the famously error-prone instructions get fixed. Meanwhile, existing Dragon and Cyber-Hobby boxings just became legacy items, and we stock a deep pre-owned selection, shipping Canada-wide from Toronto.

Strip away the corporate framing and there are two moving parts:

Dragon is repositioning away from kit production

Going forward, DML describes itself as an intellectual-property, 3D-data, digital-asset and licensing business rather than a manufacturer of injection-moulded plastic kits.

Selected Dragon tooling has been sold to Zimi Model

Zimi will independently develop, produce, market and distribute those product lines under its new DRAMi Model brand, which it says will carry forward Dragon's emphasis on detail, authenticity and historical accuracy. The name is the giveaway: DRAgon + ziMi. Dragon keeps the brand and the IP; Zimi gets the steel and the responsibility for everything that comes off it.

New tooling slowed to a trickle

At its peak, Dragon released genuinely new armour kits at a pace nobody could match. By the early 2020s, the release lists were dominated by reboxes, "Bonus Version" repacks, and existing kits re-issued with added photo-etch or Magic Tracks rather than fresh tooling.

Pricing fatigue set in

"Dragon pricing" became shorthand on the forums for older tooling that never seemed to get cheaper. Kits like the Sd.Kfz.250/253 family and the Marder series command strong money precisely because Dragon was, for some subjects, the only game in town.

The company had been diversifying away for years

Diecast (Dragon Wings), 1/6 action figures, collectibles and ODM work for other brands all pulled focus from the core kit business long before this announcement.

The community saw it coming

Well before the official word, modelling forums carried open speculation about whether Dragon's "new era" talk was simply a polite way of saying it would stop making plastic kits. That read turned out to be correct.

Zimi Model is the less familiar name here. Based on a company org chart circulated within the community, Zimi's portfolio reportedly sits alongside brands such as Panda, Toucan and Kittyhawk. The working assumption among armour builders is that Zimi may operate primarily as a moulding and production house that acquires tooling, rather than a research-driven design studio in the Dragon mould.

Here's the thing worth saying plainly: Dragon's weakness was never its plastic. The moulding quality and engineering were excellent. The recurring complaints were error-prone instruction sheets and high prices. If Zimi simply runs the existing tooling competently (and, ideally, cleans up the instructions and prices the re-pops sensibly), the result could be a net positive: classic Dragon subjects staying in production instead of vanishing into the second-hand market.

The open questions are the obvious ones. Will DRAMi discount the re-pops, or hold Dragon-era prices? Will the instructions get fixed? Which subjects make the cut? Nobody knows yet. But "Dragon is dead" is the wrong headline. "Dragon's catalogue changed hands" is the right one.

If you build armour, a meaningful slice of your stash almost certainly wears a Dragon or Cyber-Hobby label. As of this announcement, those kits quietly became legacy items: the boxings you own now, in the form you own them, are no longer being produced by the company that made them. Whatever DRAMi eventually releases will be a new label, possibly a revised kit, at a price yet to be set.

In practical terms, original Dragon and Cyber-Hobby boxings (especially the harder-to-find Premium Editions, the older Smart Kits, and subjects with no modern competitor) are the ones most likely to firm up in value as existing supply becomes the only supply. If there's a specific Dragon kit you've been meaning to build, the case for buying the one in front of you, rather than waiting on a hypothetical DRAMi re-pop, is stronger today than it was a month ago.

We'll be candid: even before this announcement, getting Dragon kits at a consistent pace (and at a price that wasn't frankly insane) was difficult to the point of near-impossible. New releases were routinely landing at $150+ CAD through normal hobby distribution. At that cost, we deemed it irresponsible to put them on the shelf and ask our customers to pay it, so for the most part, we didn't.

As a result, the majority of our current Dragon and Cyber-Hobby stock comes from our estate sales and collection pickups, kits sourced from collections across Ontario and the rest of Canada rather than from new distribution. It's how we've kept a deep, fairly priced selection on the shelf while new-release pricing went where it went.

The practical upshot: if you spot a Dragon or Cyber-Hobby kit in our listings that interests you, don't hesitate. With everything in flux (production moving to Zimi, the DRAMi catalogue still unannounced, and our own restock depending on what comes through the door), resupply on any given kit is not exactly set in stone.

For the Record: What About Cyber-Hobby?

Cyber-Hobby was never a separate factory. It was Dragon's web-exclusive, direct-to-collector label: the home for limited runs, "Orange Box" exclusives and special boxings drawn from the same Dragon tooling. Because it was a sales channel and brand rather than an independent manufacturer, it effectively winds down alongside the parent. The kits already produced under the Cyber-Hobby name are now exactly the kind of out-of-production boxings that get harder to find with time.

If Dragon's situation or DRAMi's plans change, we'll update this post. For now, this is where things stand as of the May 2026 announcement.

Have Dragon or Cyber-Hobby kits you're thinking of moving on, or a full collection? We've been buying and reselling model collections from our Toronto storefront since 1986. Browse the current Dragon range, or ask us about an estate & collection buyout. Visit us at 1880 Danforth Ave or call (416) 752-0071.