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Denyer
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Post by Denyer »

Might be in for Brawl, personally. All of the limbs look decent enough -- Onslaught less so.
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Post by numbat »

Maybe it's just because I haven't seen or played the computer game (yeah - I'm a UK 80s kid), but I just don't see the improvement. I actually really like FOC Bruticus - he has flaws / compromises, but really does deliver (I'm a fan of the G2 colour scheme). That doesn't look much better to me - just shifts the balance of compromise (while presumably adding considerable cost). But, hey, we're all into different things - and third party stuff is even more personal.

New sale thread added with a range of Transformers including Masterpiece, Botcon, CHUG, RID, Movies etc.

Looking for MP-11T Thundercracker and MP-9 Rodimus v2 (Takara version with as few QC issues as possible).


Check out my new sale thread now!

Also items on eBay.
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Denyer
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Post by Denyer »

Fansproject Not-Mindwipe... nice, but Skullcruncher's the next one I'm really interested in. (Unless the Not-Brainstorm, Smart Robin, comes with a more comic-faithful head.)

http://www.tfw2005.com/boards/transform ... st10139414

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Post by Knightdramon »

Peaugh has made a video review of MMC's core Razorclaw figure [Leo Dux or something], which shows off parts of the combination and the final Predaking toy [albeit with test shots].

I don't like Predaking, neither as a Decepticon combiner nor as separate characters.

Yet I'm ready to forsake a month's rent and food for that thing on my table.

As a toy, it ticks all the boxes for me.
Few stuff in the UK to trade/sell. Measly sales thread.
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Post by Denyer »

Not likely to pull the trigger on it until after Xmas and seeing the alt mode and some colours on it, but I'm liking this MP scale Slag homage... whereas I think there'll be an official Shockwave at some point, I doubt Takara will do the dinos...

http://www.tfw2005.com/transformers-new ... ia-178774/

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Post by Clay »

Warbotron preorders are up. Pricing is slightly less than Uranos, and should be around the same size. Hitherto unknown company producing it, though.

We are well and truly spoiled for choice these days.
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Post by Warcry »

Denyer wrote:Not likely to pull the trigger on it until after Xmas and seeing the alt mode and some colours on it, but I'm liking this MP scale Slag homage... whereas I think there'll be an official Shockwave at some point, I doubt Takara will do the dinos...
I'd say the Dinobots are very likely, considering their popularity in the fandom. Don't think they'd happen any time soon though, the designers being on an "Autobot car" kick and all. And honestly...not sure how much better they'd be able to do than this anyway, at least in robot mode. That's a great-looking Slag. I love the way the rear dino legs fold up into his shins like that! Curious what the dino looks like, and how it looks with MP Grimlock (which I don't have, making it a bit superfluous for me...).

Shame about the price, though. :( $200 is pretty steep.
Clay wrote:Warbotron preorders are up. Pricing is slightly less than Uranos, and should be around the same size. Hitherto unknown company producing it, though.
Those are supposed to be Combaticons? Eh. One of the many, many things I don't get the excitement for.
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Post by Denyer »

Warcry wrote:I'd say the Dinobots are very likely, considering their popularity in the fandom.
In argument against them being likely (although it boils down to high cost of entry):

- They'd probably be done in scale with Grimlock, if at all
- They're of interest to most people as an ensemble piece
- Snarl and Sludge are "also there" characters to most people
- The recolour options are minor or of limited appeal (Diaclone, G2)

If the next movie sets off Dinobot fever I wouldn't rule it out, but considering how much a Prime/Magnus/Seeker mould has to be milked and that the trend is for smaller items, I suspect that official sources won't want the risks.

And you've got to consider the effect that third parties getting there first does have; the official piece has to be better or significantly enough cheaper to appeal to both those that were on the fence and those that have already committed.

Shockwave could do it, best guess.
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Post by Denyer »

Clay wrote:Warbotron preorders are up. Pricing is slightly less than Uranos, and should be around the same size. Hitherto unknown company producing it, though.
Hmm. Less keen on the aesthetic, seeing not-Brawl in robot mode... he's come out more like a run-of-the-mill car design...

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Post by Warcry »

Denyer wrote: - They'd probably be done in scale with Grimlock, if at all
I can't think of any reason why this would be a negative, frankly. I'm way less impressed with Slag after reading that TFW thread and finding out that he's going to be an inch taller than Grimlock and you'll need to give your Dinobot leader a set of aftermarket booties so that they don't look stupid together.
Denyer wrote:If the next movie sets off Dinobot fever I wouldn't rule it out, but considering how much a Prime/Magnus/Seeker mould has to be milked and that the trend is for smaller items, I suspect that official sources won't want the risks.
I don't think you can really say there's "milking" going on. With the seekers in particular, even after, what, eight or ten releases the fans keep snapping them up, and you can't go anywhere on the big boards without running into people who say they need a new Skywarp using the new mold, or demanding the design be retooled into Coneheads.

And for Prime, it's just an issue of demand. He's Optimus Prime, pretty much everyone in the fandom is going to want one. They could re-release the mold every year for the next decade and not run out of market for it, since a lot of folks either couldn't find the earlier ones or joined the fandom after they were released.

I mean, if people want it, it's not like Takara and Hasbro are just going to ignore that.
Denyer wrote:And you've got to consider the effect that third parties getting there first does have; the official piece has to be better or significantly enough cheaper to appeal to both those that were on the fence and those that have already committed.

Shockwave could do it, best guess.
Sorry, not buying it. I've heard those same arguments too many times about too many things, and seen it proven wrong too many times.

Hasbro will never release the rest of the Classics seekers at retail because of the BotCon set? Wrong. We'll never get a new triplechanger Springer because of the FansProject one? Wrong. Third parties have taken over the combiner market and Hasbro will never make another? Wrong. The iGear MP seekers are better than the official ones, so Takara will never be able to sell that mold again? Wrong (also hilarious, because Takara's MP-11 steals the changes iGear made in the first place). And there's more examples too. In every instance, people went on and on about how awesome the 3P or convention toys were and how Hasbro would never be able to top them, and in every instance people gobbled up the official/mass market versions once they were announced. And it's not even like the newer versions are universally better, but the fandom as a whole has the attention span of a goldfish and forgets about the old stuff as soon as something shiny and new comes along.

Third-party stuff is especially vulnerable because of the high price and lead time between order and delivery. Go read the thread at TFW and you'll see a bunch of people cancelling preorders for some other, different 3P item so that they can order Slag. Three weeks ago, they would have been telling us how awesome those 3P Predacons or Bruticus toys were, but now they're forgotten and Slag is the shit. How many of those folks are going to cancel Slag in turn when a different company reveals, say, MP versions of Shrapnel or Perceptor or Omega Supreme? Or, heck, imagine if Takara announced an official MP Slag next week. Sight unseen, how many people would cancel their preorder on this third-party one for it? I'd say lots.

On top of that, as I understand it the lead Japanese designer has openly stated that he plans to make MPs of all the season one characters (tangent -- that might actually include more characters that I thought at first glance...weren't the first two western seasons released at once in Japan?), and that list would definitely include Dinobots. That doesn't necessarily mean it will happen, and I remain convinced that Takara will stick to their usual bad habits and run the line into the ground/start selling pedophile-attracting figures with the robots any day now, but you'd have to think that the Dinobots would be way ahead of everyone but Bumblebee and the flashier Diaclone cars on their list of stuff that's going to sell.

And in 2016 or whenever they get around to it, these 3P Dinos will be a distant memory and the fandom will greedily snap up the official ones, even if they're objectively worse than the fakes. Because that's just what we do, every single time this situation comes up.
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Post by Clay »

Warcry wrote:Or, heck, imagine if Takara announced an official MP Slag next week. Sight unseen, how many people would cancel their preorder on this third-party one for it? I'd say lots.
That actually sort of happened to the company producing the Slag. One of their previous projects was a masterpiece-style Soundwave, and a week later Takara announced theirs. So the third-party company just canceled the whole project instead of competing and went on to produce the Shockwave/Quakewave.
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Post by Cliffjumper »

Warcry wrote:tangent -- that might actually include more characters that I thought at first glance...weren't the first two western seasons released at once in Japan?
Seasons 1 & 2 were merged, yes... but I'm not sure whether it's been somewhat un-done by Japanese fandom's worship of the original cartoon, in the same way otakus take the original Japanese version of a show over a Western chop-shop version. The Pioneer covers, for example, feature the Western logo, drop "Fight! Super Robot Lifeforms", a decidedly Western look to a lot of the art work and could pass as American DVDs; most of Ichigawa's semi-official work is heavily focused on the Western cartoons as a base, etc. It's always kind-of amused me that Western TF fans were/are always interested in Dai Atlas and Sixknight while the Japanese fans are "Who? Let's talk about Optimus Prime and Bumblebee please...".

[/curious uninformed unrelated speculation]
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Post by Cliffjumper »

A bit more on-topic, 3rd Party stuff just leaves me strangely cold. It feels too abstract, it's too expensive and it's all oddly samey. No matter what facet of Transformers is firing my... fires... at any one particular time, be it a well-timed re-read of a Titan TPB, catching a few episodes of Prime, reading Eugen or having a Bayathon, the thing that remains largely unshakeable is my love of the Diaclone-based toys, warts and all. I've got MP Sideswipe sitting here and he's great, but he's also strangely transient compared to the block-legged party-shagging-motion-expert original. I'm the same with 3rd party stuff - there's always going to be a slightly better Prowl to come with articulated toes and a little persex cloud of smoke you can clip onto his gob, but the original is there, finite and in its' own way beautiful and perfect, job done. The updates are always going to get updated on and superceded, and it's too expensive to win the game (well, unless you shill for TFSource).
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Post by Denyer »

I can't think of any reason why this would be a negative, frankly.
Cost. There's a larger potential market for the cars than Grimlock, simply due to pricing; leading onto...
I don't think you can really say there's "milking" going on.
...more of the moulds than not have been chosen are ones they can get multiple characters from. "Milking" not as a pejorative, incidentally, just meaning reuse. Where a mould can't be reused it's a bigger gamble (or has to be underwritten by something else) and we see fewer of them.
seen it proven wrong too many times
Don't think I was dreaming that more than one official source has indicated that reissues have been deferred or not investigated due to the market they estimate already having something in-hand.

Partly it's Takara's reluctance to use certain methods to do reissues, though.
We'll never get a new triplechanger Springer because of the FansProject one? Wrong. Third parties have taken over the combiner market and Hasbro will never make another? Wrong.
They're wrong due to either comparing apples and oranges or just being ****ing stupid, though. Mass-market figures don't compete with hundred-dollar ones, and there's no reason anyone would bow out of making figures that combine.
how many people would cancel
That's less a third party issue and more standard collector budget allocation decisions. Knowing that another product will be coming out, in a similar price bracket, most people will wait to see the other one. Large-ticket planned purchases often get cancelled in favour of other large-ticket purchases.

Also, "the fandom as a whole" doesn't exist any more than smaller groups are homogeneous. Relative to numbers sold, surprisingly little collectible product makes it back onto the main online markets. Either folk are doubling up or sticking with their choices.

The main issues third parties have to deal with are price differentials and trust issues over quality and delivering.
They could re-release the mold every year for the next decade
If they could make it pay, they'd re-release more than they do.
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Post by Clay »

Cliffjumper wrote:Seasons 1 & 2 were merged, yes... but I'm not sure whether it's been somewhat un-done by Japanese fandom's worship of the original cartoon, in the same way otakus take the original Japanese version of a show over a Western chop-shop version.
Wait wait wait wait.... didn't the Dinobots show up in the western season one regardless? If so, they're in that first group no matter how the episodes are categorized.
Cliffjumper wrote: I'm the same with 3rd party stuff - there's always going to be a slightly better Prowl to come with articulated toes and a little persex cloud of smoke you can clip onto his gob, but the original is there, finite and in its' own way beautiful and perfect, job done. The updates are always going to get updated on and superceded, and it's too expensive to win the game (well, unless you shill for TFSource).
Yep, that was pretty much my thesis statement for this article.
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Post by Cliffjumper »

Clay wrote:Wait wait wait wait.... didn't the Dinobots show up in the western season one regardless? If so, they're in that first group no matter how the episodes are categorized.
Yeh, sorry, was tangientally wandering, obviously the Dinos are S1 either way. Do, say, Air Raid or Groove count as Season 1 characters to the Japanese or not?

The cartoon straddles the toy releases quite awkwardly when you think about it - Season 1 covers the 1984 range and the advance figures from '85; Season 2 has the bulk of the 1985 range (after a dozen or so [?] episodes using the Season 1 cast...) then the first few figures from 1986, the Movie has the bulk of the 1986 range, Season 3 tidies up the rest and has the advanced guard of 1987...
Yep, that was pretty much my thesis statement for this article.
Nice read - must pay more attention to the site. And yeh, I think it's going to be a big problem for 3rd Party companies in the future. I would theorise that while there might be a lot of dilly-dallying over ordering that once a 3P figure arrives in a collector's hands as long as the quality is passable they're inclined to stick - so say you buy a third party Shockwave that's excellent and then in a year's time someone else comes up with a slightly better one, the collector is likely to stick unless they have money to burn (or shills for TFSource) as the price is so high.

Whereas Hasbro's unit prices are lower which would probably make buyers more willing to upgrade - if, say, a new 'Classics' Prowl was to come out which did a better job than the Universe one, even if not by much, lots more people would be tempted to take a punt as they're paying $13 or whatever rather than five, six times that.

Where the third party products might be competing more directly with Hasbro are the random recolours - RTS No Seriously Tracks Did Just Look Like Wheeljack With Backwards Legs might have found fewer mugs buyers if there'd been more of a prospect of a 3P Tracks that maybe looked a bit like Tracks. But then I suspect even on 'fannish' recolours like Black Shadow Hasbro's buyers are probably still 95% kids, so it won't bother them overly. Alt/BT were I suspect quite lucky not to have such skilled competition.
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Post by Warcry »

Clay wrote:That actually sort of happened to the company producing the Slag. One of their previous projects was a masterpiece-style Soundwave, and a week later Takara announced theirs. So the third-party company just canceled the whole project instead of competing and went on to produce the Shockwave/Quakewave.
Right. I remember that now!

Weren't they also doing a Blaster as well? Was he canned too?
Cliffjumper wrote:A bit more on-topic, 3rd Party stuff just leaves me strangely cold. It feels too abstract, it's too expensive and it's all oddly samey.
It leaves me cold too, but for different reasons. Aside from some of iGear's output, which were...well, basically retooled bootlegs (their MP seekers, their Impactor, probably a few others) none of the third-party stuff seems to have any cohesiveness and very little of it fits, either with other 3P items or with official stuff. I think you were the one a few years ago who pointed out the futility of designing beautiful G1-accurate versions of Swindle and Blast Off when they were designed to combine with a bunch of Energon toys that looked nothing like the other Combaticons. And that same sort of cognitive dissonance seems to afflict most other third-party offerings too.

I mean, just looking at the pictures that Clay included in his article (and not including the armour for ROTF Prime, which is actually good) I see: a weird thing that doesn't even look like it belongs in the same room as real Transformers that people purport to be Ultra Magnus; a Hardhead that looks like the 1987 toy with extra joints; versions of Devastator and Shockwave that are way too big for Classics but not nearly G1-accurate enough to pass as Masterpieces; Omega Supreme is the only one who actually looks like he'd "fit" with any other toys.

That's not to say that all of these figures are awful (Magnus is though, I laugh every time I see that piece of crap in a shelf of Classics toys) but the scattergun approach they've taken to making stuff really hurts the appeal, for me. But then, there are probably fifteen "major" groups operating by now. What else would you expect?
Cliffjumper wrote:No matter what facet of Transformers is firing my... fires... at any one particular time, be it a well-timed re-read of a Titan TPB, catching a few episodes of Prime, reading Eugen or having a Bayathon, the thing that remains largely unshakeable is my love of the Diaclone-based toys, warts and all. I've got MP Sideswipe sitting here and he's great, but he's also strangely transient compared to the block-legged party-shagging-motion-expert original. I'm the same with 3rd party stuff - there's always going to be a slightly better Prowl to come with articulated toes and a little persex cloud of smoke you can clip onto his gob, but the original is there, finite and in its' own way beautiful and perfect, job done. The updates are always going to get updated on and superceded, and it's too expensive to win the game (well, unless you shill for TFSource).
I don't disagree with this, but it's true with official product as well. It really depends on the "breadth" of your collection, though. If you're constantly buying and re-buying every character as soon as a newer, better one comes out, you're going to spend a lot of money spinning your wheels. Personally I couldn't fathom spending that much time, effort or cash on anything but a handful of favourite characters (Prowl, Soundwave, Shockwave, Hot Rod, Bludgeon, Spinister, most of the BW cast...), with other toys getting picked up only if they really catch my eye, but I know that lots of folks are a bit less...discerning than that.
Denyer wrote:Cost. There's a larger potential market for the cars than Grimlock, simply due to pricing; leading onto...
Gotcha. I thought you were going to make an argument that Grimlock wasn't big enough, which I see all the time on other boards and which makes me want to tear my hair out. People acting as if scale beyond vague large/medium/small groupings existed in the G1 cartoon are a pet peeve of mine. :)
Denyer wrote:...more of the moulds than not have been chosen are ones they can get multiple characters from. "Milking" not as a pejorative, incidentally, just meaning reuse. Where a mould can't be reused it's a bigger gamble (or has to be underwritten by something else) and we see fewer of them.
I'm actually not sure how much of a difference that makes at this price point. I was pretty bemused when it turned out that Takara was going to put out two non-show redecos of the Lamborghini mold just because...well, I didn't think anyone would buy them. Tigertrack and especially G2 Sideswipe, who had extensive retooling done, just don't seem to have the same level of appeal as a cartoon guy, and even as lower-run releases I didn't think they'd do well (and Tigertrack at least doesn't seem to have sold well by MP standards, with the price being reduced on several major sites).

And the next two MP cars are Wheeljack and Bumblebee, neither of which have quick or high-profile redecos at all (though if you've ever wanted an MP Slicer or Marlboor, cross your fingers...). That makes me think that redecos aren't as big a factor in their plans for MPs as they are for, say, a standard Deluxe toy.
Denyer wrote:Don't think I was dreaming that more than one official source has indicated that reissues have been deferred or not investigated due to the market they estimate already having something in-hand.

Partly it's Takara's reluctance to use certain methods to do reissues, though.
That might be true in certain markets, but Hasbro seems to be making a tidy profit re-reissuing their Commemorative Series stuff for the Asian market these days.
Denyer wrote:Also, "the fandom as a whole" doesn't exist any more than smaller groups are homogeneous. Relative to numbers sold, surprisingly little collectible product makes it back onto the main online markets. Either folk are doubling up or sticking with their choices.
Not entirely sure I agree with that -- there were a lot of Warbot Defenders up for sale earlier this year when the new Springer came out, for example. But it can be hard to gauge with third-party stuff, because they're so low-run compared to official TFs that even if there is a massive sell-off of certain items it might not register on our radar.

Also, we tend to forget but both the impetus and the primary market for this stuff isn't really us -- it's the burgeoning Asian fandom, just like the Asian fandom are the ones making it. How that impacts sales and distribution, we don't really know.
Denyer wrote:If they could make it pay, they'd re-release more than they do.
I'm not sure they would. Part of the MP line's branding is exclusivity, for better or worse. If they made the molds more easily available they'd make money off of it in the short term, but in the long term it would take away from the "feeding frenzy" that happens when a new MP toy is released and possibly hurt future sales. It's a fine balancing act...Takara could probably make twice as many of each MP available as they do, charge less than the Hasbro prices and still make a profit...but then the line would lose the "high-end collector" tag it's acquired and just become another toyline, killing a lot of the buzz in the process.
Clay wrote:Yep, that was pretty much my thesis statement for this article.
Just curious...while writing this, did you look into whether or not third-party toys exist in any other fandom? I don't follow too many other toylines that closely, but I've never seen anything even close to this level of fan production for anything else. The Lego fandom tend to produce custom accessories and reprolabels-style custom minifigure stickers, but the idea of third-party bricks is anathema. Third-party TMNT or DC stuff likewise doesn't seem to be very thick on the ground, which is a surprise -- surely it'd be way easier and cheaper to produce non-transforming figures? Especially for DC stuff, whose fans have a legitimate case when they talk about how Mattel has screwed them for the last few years.
Cliffjumper wrote:Yeh, sorry, was tangientally wandering, obviously the Dinos are S1 either way. Do, say, Air Raid or Groove count as Season 1 characters to the Japanese or not?
Yeah, that's what I was wondering. As best as I can recall, so far the only characters who weren't in our S1 who've gotten new MP molds are Hot Rod (a hugely popular character on both sides of the pond) and Ratbat (a tiny accessory to a bigger toy). I'd be curious to know whether Takara sees guys like Powerglide or Beachcomber or Astrotrain or Perceptor as viable, or if "Season 1" to them means the same as it does to us -- the 1984 Hasbro catalogue plus Devastator, Skyfire, Dinobots, Insecticons, Shockwave and Reflector. Honestly I'd be really surprised if they dipped into that pool too deeply...the cast from the '86 movie seem to attract more nostalgia, and I'd expect to see Galvatron and the like well before they touch guys like Warpath if the line gets that far.
Cliffjumper wrote:The cartoon straddles the toy releases quite awkwardly when you think about it - Season 1 covers the 1984 range and the advance figures from '85; Season 2 has the bulk of the 1985 range (after a dozen or so [?] episodes using the Season 1 cast...) then the first few figures from 1986, the Movie has the bulk of the 1986 range, Season 3 tidies up the rest and has the advanced guard of 1987...
That's just an artifact of the US way of scheduling a TV season, I think. The new TV season starts in September, so a cartoon starting in September 1984 will need to advertise the summer '84 and winter '85 stuff (though as best as I can tell, Dinobots and Insecticons and the like would have been coming out around Christmas anyway, just like Wave 1 of the 2014 toys will start showing up in stores over the next few weeks if they haven't already).
Cliffjumper wrote:Nice read - must pay more attention to the site. And yeh, I think it's going to be a big problem for 3rd Party companies in the future. I would theorise that while there might be a lot of dilly-dallying over ordering that once a 3P figure arrives in a collector's hands as long as the quality is passable they're inclined to stick - so say you buy a third party Shockwave that's excellent and then in a year's time someone else comes up with a slightly better one, the collector is likely to stick unless they have money to burn (or shills for TFSource) as the price is so high.
I'm not so sure about that. A lot of people still openly say that they're only buying a certain third-party toy as a placeholder until a "real one" comes out. That seems like a kinda silly approach to me, but I think it's the only way a lot of folks can justify to themselves buying a fake. It's the same sort of attitude that some folks had about outright bootlegs a decade ago.
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Post by inflatable dalek »

Cliffjumper wrote: Nice read - must pay more attention to the site.


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Post by Terome »

This looks neat. Is it neat?
BMOG!
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Post by Denyer »

Cliffjumper wrote:I would theorise that while there might be a lot of dilly-dallying over ordering that once a 3P figure arrives in a collector's hands as long as the quality is passable they're inclined to stick - so say you buy a third party Shockwave that's excellent and then in a year's time someone else comes up with a slightly better one, the collector is likely to stick unless they have money to burn
Yeah, that's my take on it. And given sufficient appeal the same goes for official high-ticket items... Warbot Defender being liquidated isn't the best example because Generations Springer is a mass-market figure rather than a premium one, and WD wasn't an accurate representation of the character in the first place.
Warcry wrote:And the next two MP cars are Wheeljack and Bumblebee, neither of which have quick or high-profile redecos at all (though if you've ever wanted an MP Slicer or Marlboor, cross your fingers...). That makes me think that redecos aren't as big a factor in their plans for MPs as they are for, say, a standard Deluxe toy.
I think it's more a question of keeping as many of them as variant-friendly as possible. Even if it's a case of "wait a bit and then do deluxe versions", because of the vehicle licensing (and odds that that's fixed term) they need to maximise profit within a window.

With Bumblebee, are we certain they've squared the bug with VW? Could be looking at Cliffjumper, Hubcap, and any number of less-known minibots.
I'm not sure they would. Part of the MP line's branding is exclusivity, for better or worse. If they made the molds more easily available they'd make money off of it in the short term, but in the long term it would take away from the "feeding frenzy" that happens when a new MP toy is released and possibly hurt future sales.
Implicit in "if they could make it pay", really (although for how much longer is this viable with professional bootleggers getting involved?)

As you say, Asia being a boom market is both interesting and largely unknown. LEGO's certainly doing well.
Third-party TMNT or DC stuff likewise doesn't seem to be very thick on the ground, which is a surprise -- surely it'd be way easier and cheaper to produce non-transforming figures?
The fandom attracts engineers, the science end of science fiction fans and the product's particularly tactile and creative. Third party product is also easier to defend in a way that a likeness of Wolverine or Batman/Superman isn't.
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