TF Views

JediTricks wrote:Well, here are your Hasbro choices for Devastator for comparison:
Wellllll: http://tfwiki.net/wiki/Image:Devastator ... BoxPic.jpg
Uhhh: http://tfwiki.net/wiki/Constructicon_De ... omaster%29
Errrr: http://tfwiki.net/wiki/Image:Devastatorclassics.jpg
Awww: http://tfwiki.net/wiki/Image:ROTF_Devas ... tiondx.jpg
Umm: http://tfwiki.net/wiki/Image:PCC-toy_Steamhammer.jpg
Oh: http://tfwiki.net/wiki/Image:ROTF_Devas ... er_toy.jpg
THAT LAST ONE COST A HUNDRED DOLLARS!!!

Yeah, Herc is expensive, but there is NOTHING Hasbro is delivering even remotely on that level, it just don't exist in scale or in character accuracy. At all.

I guess owning a 'new' Devastator just isn't that high up on my priority list? Maybe that's why I'm having trouble grasping this? I'm thinking less along the lines of "What other Devastator could I get instead of Hercules?" and more like "What other cool Hasbro toys could I get instead of Hercules for $600?". I have no sentimental attachment to G1, these boxy vehiclebots are more interchangeable to me than they are to you.

That said, Classics Devastator has been high up on my list for some time now, and would be my ideal 'new' Devastator, bar Hasbro making a new-new one later down the line.

Honestly, I'd take the Micromasters, Steamhammer, or even the Universe Devastator over the original any day of the week. But yeah, for someone that really wanted a G1-style Devastator, it's third party or nothin'. For now.

I just couldn't go for a Herc myself. I mean, I actually could afford to do it right now if I really wanted to, so that's not even an issue, but cripes. I've bought cars that cost less that thing. That's like...that's more than a month's rent for me. I just couldn't justify to myself shelling that sort of cash on a toy. Or, I guess, technically six toys, but still.

Classics Dev is actually really awesome, fuck the haters.

The last 6 months has been the opposite, Hasbro has a shaky future on the horizon with lower support, poor communications with consumers, and a swath of canceled products going all the way back to before Botcon really (I'm looking more at the canceled Generations-style basics and the produced-but-liquidated pieces, but since those are the same SKU as the movie line and intended to keep retailers on the line through until the movie came, it's somewhat in the same box).

Just to emphasize a strongly implied point from JT's over-all post: He is saying this as a smark (smart-mark). He follows the business. A casual consumer is not gonig to follow the business. For them, a long spell of no product, or thin product, is more an occassion to move on to something else.

All that said, Hasbro has a fantastic exclusives division, it's just that Transformers hasn't gotten much play there in the past few years aside from Masterpieces. Most TF exclusives over the last year or 2 that I can remember are just boxed sets of existing figures with alternate paint jobs - fine for casual market consumers, but it eats up the TF exclusives budget and doesn't leave retailer real estate space for those special items from the collector market-focus. Worse still, many of those box-up repaints aren't even product that required catching up, much of it was available the entire time of its initial run. So if they freed up exclusives space, they could use more of those canceled molds getting product into collectors' hands via the exclusives route.

Same character reolours of stuff that is on the shelves is a waste of space. Hasbro could use exclusives for same-character recolours, and then use the main line for *new* toys. Or, vice versa. But, the line is incestuous in its use of a small number of characters/moulds.

Movie (in the process of being canceled but retailers still have existing orders of old stock coming in)
- Prime
- Generations
- Rescue Bots
- Other Younger Kids Stuff
- Bot Shots
- Kre-O
- Licensed-brand Transformers (SW, Marvel)

Hasbro could solve many problems b by killing the tertiary crap that nobody buys, which would include most RP and little kid toys. Have one kiddie line, (like the first movie's Fast Action Battlers or the Robot Heroes), one regular line, and maybe a high-end toy or two for collectors.

Get toy focus back onto the characters. There seems to be some aversion to this the past few years, the bio notes get simpler, the character art gets more generic, basically the assumption being that the existing media - whether it's the movie, the new cartoon, the video game, or even the classic G1 series - will do all the heavy lifting for selling the figure. The toy sells because of its play appeal but also because of its personality, and the packaging hasn't been doing a very good job of moving that message. Hell, the packaging doesn't even do a good job of co-selling other product in the line anymore! Hasbro has split the brand into 2 halves: developing the toy line, and developing the brand as a media expression - but that fractures the vision for the line, there's no one entity at Hasbro anymore that can express a passionate vision for both at the same time, not really.

Agreed. Character content put the line over its competitors, (which often had better *toys*), in the 80s. I think that JT makes too much of box art. The 80s packaging art was also pretty awful. But, he is right about character profiles and co-sells. Hasbro does this with other lines. Hell, MLP has product catalogues w/ character profiles. They could have an intern write up package content (comics, profiles, whatever). Requiring fans, especially kids, to go online to supplement their toy purchase is idiotic. If nothing else, it gives the kid a chance to be lured away and seduced by a competitor.

Content is what is keeping me in now, primarily through the comics. Gomess has been focused exclusively on content for years, even if his tastes have been anachronistic.

Also, another weird thing is that Hasbro would rather hold back production if they don't think it'll make back its budget because they think it may have release avenues later on, either as exclusives or re-released into the mainline at a later date, so they have the factories they hire hang onto the molds since it's a lot easier to store a mold than a mountain of product. This does backfire for something like the TF:Animated Voyagers though when they don't match the later aesthetic and there's no future release avenue available to them.

This also backfires with collectors. I am not collecting DotM toys, but even I am feeling the sting of the cancelled waves. I am not ordering imports, (like TigerMegatron is discussing in another thread), but I have ordered them in the past to get scarce toys.

Nobody wants to go back to the bad old days (beast era and earlier) of wondering what was coming out, or even if it was coming out. This nearly put me off the hobby in 2006, and it is not exactly helping to keep me in now.

I could get nearly 60 Hasbro Deluxes, and plenty of those have turned out to be 'super awesome' in their own right.

If you can find them.....

Well, here are your Hasbro choices for Devastator for comparison:

Exactly. If you just want a big robot that is made of smaller robots that turn in to construction vehicles, you have plenty of options.

But, if you want the specific characters from G1, there are no real options.

don't have any hard numbers anymore, it's been a long time since those articles were written, but the reality is that Hasbro basically leveraged the company to buy up other toy companies that owned SW licenses and then overproduce beyond all demand AT THE SAME TIME AS RAISING PRICES ACROSS THE BOARD, all with a movie that sold merch ok but nowhere near what Hasbro had pushed into production. The company was heading for bankruptcy fast by the end of 2000, something like a third was invested into product that was clogging their various warehouses.

I remember this. The sad thing is that Episode 1 figues were really good. But, the movie itself was not good enough to justify buying many of the figures if you were anything other than a hard core collector. Kids bought main characters. But, they would have hit the price wall pretty hard when their parents balked at spending $10 for a basic figure in 1999. (This would be like spending $15 - $20 for a standard figure now.)



Dom
-so, what is happening for GI Joe's 30th anniversary? (Yeah, the same might happen for TF.)

For Joe's 30th? The line basically got slapped with some generic-ass packaging for the last waves of 2011 that were more an extension of Pursuit of Cobra than anything else. Then the last couple waves anybody found were all Renegades figures, who are (IMO) exactly what I wish the Prime toyline had been. The movie is next year and appears to be making zero note that this is the 30th anniversary of the 4" line.

The Renegades toys...look like regular Joes. I mean, they have design cues that match up to the Renegades animation models. But they don't have the simplified look of the animation. They just look like regular Joes. I wish the Prime toys did this--that they were more consistant with regular TF designs. Then I could just buy the toys of new characters and not worry about the ones I already own.

Onslaught Six wrote:The Renegades toys...look like regular Joes. I mean, they have design cues that match up to the Renegades animation models. But they don't have the simplified look of the animation. They just look like regular Joes. I wish the Prime toys did this--that they were more consistant with regular TF designs. Then I could just buy the toys of new characters and not worry about the ones I already own.

Spoiler

Yeah I'm bringing this up again.

Wouldn't that completely defeat the purpose of designing the toys after the show, though? I mean, I'm not a fan of Prime, but I know a lot of people are, and they'd want toy that look like the show they like. To say nothing of the kids who will definitely want the toys to look like what they see on TV, lest this turn into the Beast Machines line all over again.

Plus the line would be boring as shit if everything on the pegs just looked like geewun. Variety, man!

Ah yes, I remember the Episode 1 crap. It's THE reason I will never buy anything again based on perceived resale value. On the collector side of that was the fact that Hasbro was shortpacking certain figures at the start of the line making them rare and causing collectors to go nuts trying to find them and then, about 6 months later flooded the market with them making their aftermarket value worthless. And, that's also when they started getting into the packaging versions with .000, .001, .002 and so on. So you'd get Darth Maul on a .000 card that, at the beginning of the line could have sold in aftermarket for like $40 (or more) only to have the pegs flooded with them 6 months later. So then they aren't even worth the materials they're made of. And then, on top of that, was those stupid CommTech chips. Yeah, that kinda sounds like Ewan McGregor, if he was hopped up on a bottle of Jim Beam and vicodin. Which I'm sure is nothing new for Ewan. They should have done what they did in Europe and packaged them all with Battle Droids. Then at the end of buying a ton of figures, you have an army. Of worthless crap.

As for Classics Devastator, I'd be perfectly happy with the Energon repaint that was put out. Or hell, even the actual Energon one. Or, I guess I could just buy G1 Dev and some third party parts. It would give the merged mode better articulation without costing $600. But, that doesn't improve the design of the orginal toys.

I would love to see a TF line where the toys actually look like the show models. I think that's probably one thing I really liked about Animated is that theys seemed to finally find that balance. For all of G1 and the Beast Era it seemed like Hasbro just couldn't get the proportions right. Like they were constantly trying to match the show's aesthetic and not really succeeding.

Minor packaging variants, such as ".000, .001", are a good compromise between hard-core and casual collecting.

People who want to prove they "were right there when the first cases were opened" can get their rare numbering variants. Everybody else can just take the more common later variant.

If the market is not supporting insane prices for decimal numbers, so be it. Battle Droids were troop builders. Kudos to the European market for making it easy for kids and collectors to get plenty of them.

I have no problem with scalpers. But, I am not going to argue that toy companies, (or toy collectors), are obligated in a way to make things easy for them. Scalpers operate by the principles of the free market, The invisible hand giveth, and the invisible hand taketh away.

Dom
-is actually trading an early TFU Sunstreaker mould variant to a friend for a replacement.

True. And at the time for me it was about full out scalping. I have no delusions about what I was doing or intending to do. Nor am I saying that it was Hasbro's responsibility to make it easier for me to do so. I'm just saying that experience is why I'll never collect for scalping/resale value again. If I don't want the toy for myself, I'm not buying it. And that model generally seems to work better anyway. That way if you wind up with something that's worth money so much the better but you won't feel screwed if it's not.

Shockwave
-By today's standards, most Episode 1 toys are terrible.

BWprowl wrote:I guess owning a 'new' Devastator just isn't that high up on my priority list? Maybe that's why I'm having trouble grasping this? I'm thinking less along the lines of "What other Devastator could I get instead of Hercules?" and more like "What other cool Hasbro toys could I get instead of Hercules for $600?". I have no sentimental attachment to G1, these boxy vehiclebots are more interchangeable to me than they are to you.

Owning a 'new' Bruticus wasn't high on my personal priority list, that doesn't mean it's not important to the fan base - that's what I'm thinking about here, what matters to the hardcore fanbase - some things I want, some things I don't, but I recognize that I'm not an island in collecting.

BTW, at $600, there aren't 60 separate figures you could get right now, on shelves you could buy, there's a handful of pegwarmers at each pricepoint clogging shelves, but I don't think you could get to 60.

That said, Classics Devastator has been high up on my list for some time now, and would be my ideal 'new' Devastator, bar Hasbro making a new-new one later down the line.

I own the original Build Team, it's a fun set for its time but it's got some design flaws, and it just isn't the Constructicons by any stretch of the imagination, there are the wrong number of them and the faces are all wrong for Decepticons, and the gestalt bot they build is really not that great anymore.

138 Scourge wrote:But yeah, for someone that really wanted a G1-style Devastator, it's third party or nothin'. For now.

I just couldn't go for a Herc myself. I mean, I actually could afford to do it right now if I really wanted to, so that's not even an issue, but cripes. I've bought cars that cost less that thing. That's like...that's more than a month's rent for me. I just couldn't justify to myself shelling that sort of cash on a toy. Or, I guess, technically six toys, but still.

I fully agree, but my point isn't that Hercules is a great thing, my point is that it's something Hasbro isn't remotely supplying the desire for with their own line. For the collector who does want a modern-articulated, larger gestalt that has G1 styling, Hasbro doesn't even pretend to be in that market, this Bruticus proves they're still missing the overall mark by a longshot. There is obviously a strong crying demand for this sort of thing from a significant portion of the hardcore fanbase, otherwise these 3rd party companies wouldn't be able to keep churning these things out in flagrant violation of copyright law. They are using Hasbro's intellectual property for financial gain without license, yet they keep doing it because the consumer demand has grown great enough to make the gains outweigh the risks -- it's not entirely dissimilar to the bootleggers during prohibition.

Onslaught Six wrote:Classics Dev is actually really awesome, fuck the haters.

No, it's not. It's really not awesome at all. The molds are fun in the Build Hurricane expression, but the overall is only ok, and as Devastator it's downright mediocre. Look at that Hasbro picture, that's the best they could some up with for it. It doesn't even have separate vehicles for each arm, it's just 4 guys contorting to be a friendly, slightly taller robot with wonky little arms that doesn't hold together all that well.

Dommo wrote:Same character reolours of stuff that is on the shelves is a waste of space. Hasbro could use exclusives for same-character recolours, and then use the main line for *new* toys. Or, vice versa. But, the line is incestuous in its use of a small number of characters/moulds.

There was a time when same-character recolors came a year later, when the market demand for the character had replenished after the original mold thinned out. Now days, the TF team plans those same-character recolors like 2 or 3 waves apart, so you end up with the same guy fight pegspace against himself. The worst is Bumblebee whose mold might go into double production on original and recolor during the same time. These runs are meant to be quarterly now, but the waves are faster, so a recolor can come back more than once within a quarter. IMO, that's really bad beyond the obvious reasons because this team doesn't actually know who will be selling by then, they couldn't be that in-tune with the market, trends can change at lightning speed, and yet they plan and sell retailers these cases WAY in advance, knowing they want to focus on a specific guy more and more, so pegwarming can build up twice because they already sold the product many months in advance and retailers have paid for it. Look at DOTM Topspin and repaint Topspin sharing shelves for a time last year, that's not just clogging the shelf, it's clogging the case assortments.

The funny in an annoying way thing is that the reason characters are short-packed to begin with and then put in later cases as a carry-forward is because Hasbro has only so much manufacturing capacity for that character, so they think there will be market demand, but sometimes by the time they get to that carry-forward they have also started shipping recolors of the same mold.

Agreed. Character content put the line over its competitors, (which often had better *toys*), in the 80s. I think that JT makes too much of box art. The 80s packaging art was also pretty awful. But, he is right about character profiles and co-sells. Hasbro does this with other lines. Hell, MLP has product catalogues w/ character profiles. They could have an intern write up package content (comics, profiles, whatever). Requiring fans, especially kids, to go online to supplement their toy purchase is idiotic. If nothing else, it gives the kid a chance to be lured away and seduced by a competitor.

Content is what is keeping me in now, primarily through the comics. Gomess has been focused exclusively on content for years, even if his tastes have been anachronistic.

1) The '80s packaging has nothing to do with this conversation, we're talking about now problems, not then problems.

2) The character art for packaging is so vital in a line like this when the product is often sold in alt mode rather than robot mode, and the robot mode packaged figures are not easily discernible as characters. The casual consumer who isn't fairly well-versed in the characters will only be able to discern by product color, vehicle mode, and character art. Adding more unique character statements to that (whether via art or bio notes or character quotes or tech specs or whatever) can help discern which toys the casual consumer base wants to buy.

3) Hasbro for the last 2 years has not had bio notes on any non-animated Star Wars figures, assuming the hardcore consumers they are aiming movie figures at will already know them anyway. The irony is that they trended that line to hardcore consumers, raised the price a dollar over the other mainline to offset selling in lower numbers to only hardcore consumers, then keeps making little compromises to appeal more to the casual market which often turn off the original hardcore consumers. Um, what??? That is the same Hasbro who makes our Transformers, folks. Throw your hands up in frustration? Yes, I will, thanks.

4) Going online can be a great SUPPLEMENT to a product, but you are so right that it cannot be the primary method of character information for the consumer. If nothing else, the toy consumer going home and looking up the character means they are leaving the product at the retailer only to maybe come back and buy it later.

5) Content is obviously important to the brand, the movie 1 line was driven to massive heights by simply having the idea of it out there for audiences to embrace. Kids who didn't see the movie but saw the trailer were still driven to want the product, those same kids who were responding far more tepidly to Cybertron when it moved around the schedule on Cartoon Network. Transformers is now fully engrained in society, it is iconic like Mickey Mouse or Superman, but that society still needs things to remind them of the nuances of why the brand matters beyond Optimus and Bumblebee.

This also backfires with collectors. I am not collecting DotM toys, but even I am feeling the sting of the cancelled waves. I am not ordering imports, (like TigerMegatron is discussing in another thread), but I have ordered them in the past to get scarce toys.

Nobody wants to go back to the bad old days (beast era and earlier) of wondering what was coming out, or even if it was coming out. This nearly put me off the hobby in 2006, and it is not exactly helping to keep me in now.

I was on the fence with DOTM figures, but the idea that I can't choose is really bothering me as well. I would have gotten HA Soundwave for sure and some of the TF:P FEs, while the others not so sure, but the CHOICE should have been mine, and by taking it away it gives me a bad feeling about the line and about those in charge of it.

I'm sure Hasbro doesn't want to have to deal with problems like they used to be before, but it's the choices that the brand management makes that ultimately determines that, not their resolve but their decisions, and that's where I have a problem.

If you can find them.....

As I posted above, there aren't 60 unique deluxes to get right now. And taking the line as a whole, very few of its deluxes were remotely "awesome", much less "super awesome".

Exactly. If you just want a big robot that is made of smaller robots that turn in to construction vehicles, you have plenty of options.

But, if you want the specific characters from G1, there are no real options.

My point was really that none of those options made for a very good Devastator, not that there were plenty of choices. They're all middling to bad choices, and all worthless as the character.

Shockwave wrote:Ah yes, I remember the Episode 1 crap. It's THE reason I will never buy anything again based on perceived resale value. On the collector side of that was the fact that Hasbro was shortpacking certain figures at the start of the line making them rare and causing collectors to go nuts trying to find them and then, about 6 months later flooded the market with them making their aftermarket value worthless. And, that's also when they started getting into the packaging versions with .000, .001, .002 and so on. So you'd get Darth Maul on a .000 card that, at the beginning of the line could have sold in aftermarket for like $40 (or more) only to have the pegs flooded with them 6 months later. So then they aren't even worth the materials they're made of. And then, on top of that, was those stupid CommTech chips. Yeah, that kinda sounds like Ewan McGregor, if he was hopped up on a bottle of Jim Beam and vicodin. Which I'm sure is nothing new for Ewan. They should have done what they did in Europe and packaged them all with Battle Droids. Then at the end of buying a ton of figures, you have an army. Of worthless crap.

Actually, the SW card variations thing started in '95, they used to have 2 numbers, so .00 was the original iteration, .01 was the first variant, .02 was the second. The '96 Boba Fett had a ton of variations because the numbers represented printing changes to the card only, not the product, but the figure also went through a number of paint changes in its run - we determined I think 30 different combinations on that '96 Fett figure thanks to Hasbro's numerous changes. With the first wave of Ep 1, they started changing from 2 digits to 4, so Maul shipped on .00, .01, and then switched to .0000, and then they released an entirely different paint scheme 9 months later under the .0001 card - that was when carded collectors really started getting upset and feeling duped. Yet it was just Hasbro incapable of delivering top-drawer on the first pass, like there'd be a misspelled word or a misplaced line on the art, and then an art fix might come with a product fix, it was very complicated, and was never intended for collectors to even take notice of. It wasn't just SW either, it was on most boys toys, including Transformers - I think they still use it, but it's run into the product number with no dot.

As for Classics Devastator, I'd be perfectly happy with the Energon repaint that was put out. Or hell, even the actual Energon one. Or, I guess I could just buy G1 Dev and some third party parts. It would give the merged mode better articulation without costing $600. But, that doesn't improve the design of the orginal toys.

Doesn't make them bigger either, that's something that matters too.

Dominic wrote:Minor packaging variants, such as ".000, .001", are a good compromise between hard-core and casual collecting.

People who want to prove they "were right there when the first cases were opened" can get their rare numbering variants. Everybody else can just take the more common later variant.

The early cases are not always the first out, first into the shipping containers means last out, so sometimes earliest cases come out midway through the run. A better system for that is to check by datestamp, which means deciphering the date stamp system they use (year - week - daily run). But honestly, I think collecting packaged is ultimately unrewarding, I stopped doing it about 7 years ago with SW and never did with TF because TF values are seemingly not increased by being sealed unless they are G1 (if I had to guess, it'd be due to QC issues on the rise from BW on). Some SW figures are worth more loose than packaged in the aftermarket.

I have no problem with scalpers. But, I am not going to argue that toy companies, (or toy collectors), are obligated in a way to make things easy for them. Scalpers operate by the principles of the free market, The invisible hand giveth, and the invisible hand taketh away.

They are abusing the free market, they offer no service, instead they cause the very problem they claim to solve, that of scarcity. They gobble up the new product to ensure nobody else in the area can get it easily, then sell it back at an increased price, and whatever they don't sell they convince some poor schmuck at the store's customer service desk to take back months later at full price after the product is no longer rare or no longer even sells for that price. Scalpers are a blight on any collecting community.