My received wisdom of the commercial success of the various lines would be:
G1 - sold like crazy until the last couple of years, albeit on a steady decline after 85/86. TBH, considering the lack of competition from non-action figure toys, I wouldn't be surprised if even, say, 1988 saw more units sold than anything pre-Bay. There had to be some real money coming in for Hasbro/Takara to continue throwing out so many unique moulds.
G2 - probably the only genuine main-line stinker. Wrong time, wrong ethos. I've heard it said the first year or so was a solid hit, but that makes no sense - why would they then drop the repaints and make all those new moulds when they had so many G1 figures to update?
BW - solid return to form, helped by TV series and what were at the time probably pretty decent figures.
BM - decline; not a disaster but enough of a damp squib to make Hasbro stop and think very seriously about the direction of the line.
RiD - cheap filler turned surprise hit; not a mega-hit or runaway success, but my reading would be that it performed better than Hasbro were expecting it to. Showed anime-lite and vehicles were the way to go.
Armada - solid hit; nothing spectacular but I'd reckon on around the same level as BW (with the qualifier that it came on the back of successful lines rather than G2). Over here at least it did well enough to garner the odd "Look what's coming back" newspaper article.
Energon - slight decline from Armada
Universe I - relative disaster, though it cost peanuts I suspect. Hasbro find that kids are no more interested in aging garish repaints with no media support than they were in 1994.
Cybertron - slight decline from Cybertron, possibly enough for Hasbro to make another end-of-BM "Right, let's have a look at this" think.
Classics - surprise hit after low expectations, basically pointing the way for filler lines to go.
Movie - ridiculously successful
Universe II - probably matched Classics due to Hasbro not being taken by surprise this time.
Animated - I would say while it was no disaster the line was probably a slight disappointment for Hasbro on the back of the film's success and considering how much they invested in it.
RotF - slight decline from Movie, but probably still sold much bigger numbers than any post-G1 non-film franchise.
2010 - pretty good, but beyond that I couldn't guess. I think they were experimenting a lot with this one in terms of finding out what would shift and what wouldn't. Probably did very well for a non-movie line.
DotM - bit of a decline compared to both previous movie lines; Cyberverse doesn't really seem to have caught on, and the rest of the line's been fairly half-hearted. The fact that we're still waiting for the Western release of toys of Soundwave and Que (both with not-inconsiderable supporting roles in the film; certainly more than, say, Bonecrusher and Jolt) six months after the film says something to me. For both the previous movie lines Hasbro seemed to be slinging out anything they could vaguely connected to the film such was the demand; this time around there have been very few non-appearing characters (if any, if we assume that the Twins and Jolt were perhaps designed when it looked like they would be in the film and then slung out anyway because the moulds were done). That said, the ROTF scouts that are still warming a lot of shelves two and a half years down the line might suggest a reason for that.
Sorry, that was pretty much what I meant. Having some sort of media role means a character jumps the queue, but at the end of the day a Transformer's a Transformer to kids. Scoop and Rapido might have been consolation prizes (in the same way Siren and Battletrap were for me), but you still bought 'em - mission accomplished for Hasbro.I'm sure kids will take the characters they know nothing about if they're the only choice, but they'll still look for their favourites first.
The other thing worth thinking about, though, is that few kids sit down and watch/remember episodes chronologically. For all they know, B'Boom just isn't in anything they've seen. My vague childhood recollections were that toys often turned up before comic or TV exposure, and a really cool toy (e.g. Metroplex, who took, what, three years to turn up in the comic and didn't appear on terrestrial TV over here - print advertisements in the comic had an unerring habit of arriving a fair while after toys were already on sale) would sell itself.
It's anecdotal again, but I remember more thinking how cool it was when someone I already had turned up in the comic/show, but how much of this is down to the way the show especially had such a strange existence over here.
Yeh, probably - but parents are a big factor in young kids' buying habits. They're not going to traipse around all five toy stores in town looking for Waspinator (I will segue and say he's probably a bad example - he gets blown up all the time and gets "meta for any grown-ups watching" dialogue, I'd be surprised if he was near the top of the hit list for many kids); pick one now in Target or you don't get anything.With Beast Wars having a much smaller cast, I would be really surprised if that effect wasn't even greater than it was for me. All things being equal I imagine it was a lot harder to find a Cheetor or a Waspinator than it would have been a Wolfang or a Buzz Saw.
I think the thing BW shows is there's not much difference between being given a scant role in the associated show and not being in it at all. If it had made a significant difference in sales, say enough to justify creating a CGI model, we'd have had Soundwave and Scarem dropped into the show somewhere to hang around in the background or whatever, but clearly it wasn't. Hasbro seem to have just pushed for a cross-section of toys from the range, presumably reliant on cross-sells and shelf-proximity to shift the rest.
The first movie line probably demonstrates most how things work when the line is really firing on all cylinders - kids want Bumblebee, but the franchise was doing so well when Bumblebee wasn't there it was able to shift considerable units of Stockade, Swindle and Landmine.