it's not entirely dissimilar to the bootleggers during prohibition.
Not quite. Those guys were selling something that was wholly (if wrongly) illegal.
Hasbro has no excuse not to be meeting obvious demand.
When I was younger, I would go to conventions and buy volumes of bootleg videos of BWII and BWNeo episodes.
Normally, I am all in favour of protecting intellectual property. But, I rewarded bootleggers.
Why? Why would I do such a thing? Simple. Because the official license holders were not interested in selling episodes to me legally. They would have no logical right to complain about lost sales because they were not trying to get those sales for themselves.
The same principle applies here. The 3rd party companies are filling a demand that Hasbro has no demonstrable interest in meeting.
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
RotF Mudflap(s). I could have army built both at the same time, well after them movie line itself had passed through.
1) The '80s packaging has nothing to do with this conversation, we're talking about now problems, not then problems.
What I was saying is that Hasbro compensated in other ways. The package art was abysmal. But, the profiles were solid. And, even the bad package art was distinctive enough.
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 problem is that Hasbro is now so lazy about it. Cryo-Scourge from Cybertron is an offensive example of this, as was Sky Shadow. "$30 dollar same character recolours without any context". Sky Shadow was particularly offensive because you had to read the profile note to find out it was a new character. On a Deluxe or Scout, it might have been clever. But, on a larger and more expensive Ultra, it felt like hucksterism of the lowest order.
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".
The same toys have been on the shelves for the better part of a year.
I am not against having product stick around the way it did when we were kids. (In fact, I kind of prefer it.) But, after ~10 years of fast turn around, product sitting is a sign of poor management.
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 generally open my toys. But, I keep some figures (of favourite characters) packaged. Even then, I do not worry about package variants unless there is something seriously better/worse about one variant or another.
(Although the yellow Build Team might have been RID still.)
It may have been "Universe", but it had "Armada" style fonts.
Dom
-still amazed that the first wave "Prime" toys were cancelled so out of hand.