Dominic wrote:Unless you farm your money by selling toys to begin with, it is not worth buying a few toy simply resell.
To be fair, the price on Bruticus is not that out of order. The retail for 5 deluxes is ~$75, not $65. And, a ~33% mark-up is not bad for an exclusive figure. Shockwave has new moulding. (Cluffjumper and the $20 MLP figure are factory direct gauging though.)
Bruticus is so offensive because of the colouring. Hasbro is releasing the correct colour scheme, (the one that people will recognize from the game) as a convention exclusive and releasing damn near a wave's worth of toys in a colour scheme that fewer people will recognize. Hard core collectors, the smallest segment of the market, will buy it. Confused grandparents, an inconsistent and unreliable segment, will buy it. But, casual fans who recognize TF because of media will look at it and see it as "wrong". Hasbro is effectively releasing a late run recolour as the main release. (And, we all know how well that non-media coloured figures sell.)
JT is probably right, SDCC Bruticus is likely a cash grab. Of course, in the long run, it will cost Hasbro miney. But, their decision making over the last few years has not been the most sound or rational.
At it again, Captain Contrary? MSRP for deluxes is $12.99, times 5 that's $64.95. Hasbro's convention exclusives have not carried that much markup before ever.
Shockwave has 1 piece of new molding on a $20 vehicle, it's a separate barrel from the turret so it's not a particularly complex part, how does that get you to $60?
BWprowl wrote:Da fuq? Deluxes are fifteen dollars retail where you live, Dom? At worst they’re $13 over here, which would put the total for the group just at $65, and it wouldn’t even be that since at Target they sit just a little above $12 (and I’m confident that they’ll get bumped back down to ten later in the year, as ALWAYS happens).
Thank you!
I’d like to continue thinking of Hasbro making the darker-colored Bruticus as a service they did ‘Just for the fans’ (since they were the ones who, in classic Transfan fashion, whined and whined about wanting it), but at those prices it does start to feel more like gouging. On the other hand, Hasbro wasn’t even able to get rid of all their exclusives from last year at the lower prices JT’s citing (the TFPrime exclusives can still be had on HTS) so it might be that they’re just trying to preemptively recoup losses. Either way, yeah, the price on that Bruticus stings. It was the only one I was interested in, so I’ll probably still make a point of grabbing it off of HTS post-Comic-Con. Hey, it’s better than Botcon prices and availability, right? (And you know Bruticus is going to get used for a Botcon exclusive next year, or the year after. Probably some Club exclusives too)
I don't think it's fair to call out fans on this one, Hasbro did solicit the good colorscheme first, then changed their minds and had Neon Camo Batman syndrome rain down on top of this figure.
If they weren't able to get rid of those pieces at lower prices, what makes Hasbro think raising the price will help? Even if the run was shrunk which could explain a proportional cost increase, this is between 20% and 33% of an increase in a year where they've done heavy damage to every single one of their fan bases via distribution mistakes, doesn't seem like a good time to expect lower prices - that didn't sell when they were lower - to somehow translate to higher prices selling better. Sounds to me like too much internal overhead passed onto the consumer which will only raise costs by driving away more of the consumer base - a classic failure spiral.
Botcon prices are so outside the norm that there is no justification at all beyond "ultra limited products custom-ordered by an outside vendor", and even that one you'd have to see the books on to really feel it a justification.
I dunno if they'll use Bruticus next year, I'm thinking at least 2 years since Amazon is getting an exclusive repaint this year.
Dominic wrote:Give or take. But, yeah, $15 is about right.
Except that it's not, they're $13 at Target and Walmart and stated MSRP. And you can't count sales tax because that wasn't factored into SDCC Bruticus' $100 pricetag.
Maybe this is generational. I notice that you and O6 are generally more forgiving of, and willing to reward, half-assery that guys like JT and I are simply offended by. (For example, your argue that the new Asia market Swerve is a "good Swerve figure" despite it looking nothing like the comics that made you like Swerve in the first place.)
But, I am going to have to say you are wrong on this. Toys that do not look like the movies/show/game/comics/whatever do not sell as well as screen/page accurate figures. I see more non-movie colour Bumblebees or Optimus Primes than I do correctly coloured Bumblebees or Optimus Primes. And, how many of the kids who just want a big combining robot are going to opt for the more expensive Combaticon figures (sold as 5 separate figures) when they can likely find something cheaper (and easier to convince their parents to buy), likely as one boxed set?
I tried to avoid taking us down that conversational road by barely commenting on that part of his post, but most of that rings true.
This is not a question of Hasbro releasing a set in G1 colours to keep fans happy. This is a situation where Hasbro is releasing the toy in screen-accurate colours as an exclusive and acting like they are doing use a favour. They might well be trying to avoid a repeat of last year by trying to force less devoted collectors to buy the (more expensive) exclusive at the cost of discouraging sales of the regular release. This is not the level of Thundergate in '07, but it definitely makes me glad that I am largely skipping toys this year.
Yeah, and it's doubly bad because they solicited it originally with game-accurate and more pleasing colors, then changed tactics midstream.
BWprowl wrote:Dominic wrote:Give or take. But, yeah, $15 is about right.
I’ve said it before, I’ll say it again: You need to move.
This is partly on Target's shoulders, I'll bet. I live within 2 miles of 3 different Target stores, and their prices are either $15 or $13 depending on which one you go to for these, and they change their prices back and forth arbitrarily at times as well, sometimes up and sometimes down. Target has a very aggressive "urban area" business model that seems to fluctuate wildly within blocks of each other.
See, you say ‘forgiving of half-assery’, I say ‘not overly entitled and picky’. Hasbro makes cool robot toys and I buy those that I like. I dunno, I’d love to live a life where I could complain that my giant, awesome, transforming combining robot toy has colors that are a little too bright, since it would mean that my life must be so fucking fantastic that I have absolutely *nothing* else to complain about, but unfortunately for me, collecting toys is still something I do purely for fun.
Maybe it is generational, or just a function of how I was brought up. My parents didn’t exactly buy me a ton of toys growing up, it was strictly a ‘few every birthday and Christmas’ thing. Anything else I’d have to save up my allowance and buy for myself. If I did get a toy as a gift, and I’d started crying five minutes later that it was too bright in colors or was missing a couple paint apps or didn’t look exactly like the cartoon, I’d get my shit kicked in. And rightfully so, you’re a kid who just got a toy! You literally have no reason to complain!
I don't mean this in a dickish way, but it might come off that way so I'm stating it first, but...
I notice a lot of 20-somethings lately have this almost reverse-snobbery about anybody taking issue with anything, as if they are better than everyone else for accepting those flaws as "good enough". Maybe it's from growing up with walls of Hasbro's Neon Camo Batman figures at the toy store and having no other choice but either the bright yellow with blue zig-zags Batman or the bright red with white and black stripes Batman or the bright green with white electric zaps Batman to look at, but it comes off as a pretense of "drinking PBR is fine by me, you people saying it tastes like piss are assholes for not accepting that it gets you drunk" as if discerning personal taste is a bad thing. Everybody has their personal level there though, if you got Optimus Primal for your birthday and he was missing his swords, you'd be bummed and you'd say something probably; if he was missing his ARMS you'd definitely say something. The attitude that it's ok to put up with substandard ugly colors simply because Hasbro wants an extra $35 and the rest of us are assholes for not seeing it that way though, that is kind of a dubious standing point. If we were nitpicking the shade of blue in a figure's eye color, I could give you that, but that's far from what we're talking about.
The show-accurate TFPrime Bumblebee is absolutely CLOGGING shelves here, and many other places (all I’ve got to back that up is anecdotal evidence, but it’s pretty widespread, so there you go). The DOTM Prime with the trailer isn’t exactly flying off shelves either. Meanwhile, Hot Shot, a non-show repaint character, is considerably harder to come by.
TFP Voyager Optimus is as well, that's true. TFP in general seems to not be grabbing the mainstream market as well as Hasbro hoped, this is not terribly surprising when you look back a few months and see that the retailers pulled out of TFP initially for those very same concerns, that there wasn't broad enough appeal from the product. Maybe it's a cost issue as well, but I'll stand by my "consumers aren't as familiar with TFP and aren't as attracted to the look of the product outside the context of the fiction" issue as a primary stumbling block for the line. That said, a lot of characters across CybCmdr, Dlx, and Voy are moving better than these overpacked Voy Optimus and Dlx BB.
Like what, exactly? Maybe one of those knockoff gestalts from Big Lots or something? Those won’t be sharing shelf space with the Comabticons at all, so the kids at Target will have those guys as their option for ‘big combining robot’ to bum off of their parents. Unless you’re insinuating that the parents would actually take the kid around to multiple stores in search of a ‘better deal’, in which case you’re crazy. The parent’s going to get the kid just Brawl or something with the promise of maybe getting the others later (which won’t happen, but dammit they’ve got to get out of there and get home and pay bills and start dinner) or they’ll just leave without buying anything, kid screaming for his toy be damned.
There's still a supply of PCC sets on shelves at TRU and even WM around here, there's boxed TF gift sets with 3 or more robots, there's the upcoming TFP Cyberverse robot suits (which make no sense but they are they same general concept). Plus there's Power Rangers, Bakugan, there's a few other competitors for the rough idea of "big boxed robot toy" right now.
Fun fact: My brother got that whole set of Combaticons and loved it. We watched the show, you think he gave a shit that the toys weren’t the same color as on TV? No, because it was a cool little set of transforming, combining military robots. I later got the Urban Camo set of the same molds just because they looked so cool, lack of fictional context be damned.
Fun fact: every few years, toymakers get lazy and assume that slumping sales are due to product not catching kids' eyes, so they make them bright ugly colors because bright ugly colors catch younger kids' eyes, then the whole line falls to shit in sales and the toymaker changes tactics significantly - see GI Joe in the early '90s, Batman in the late '90s/early '00s, Transformers in the '90s. Basically, any time you have bright colors it's a sign that the manufacturer is trying to compromise their core audience of pre-teen boys by aiming at the lower-market 4-to-8-year-old age group - it has so far been a gamble that's worked for a few months and then longterm never. The only line that gets away with it consistently is Power Rangers, and that's built into the concept and already has a lower age group as its core market and uses a higher generational turnaround to recapture that age market every 2 years as a new batch grows into it while the previous market has already grown out of it. Bright, loud,
mismatched colors are naturally offensive to human senses and grow moreso as they develop, it's why baby toys are appealing to babies but those same colors and shapes and sounds aren't enough of a draw to enthrall an 8-year-old; kids may get suckered in by bright shiny things at one age but soon grow tired of bright and shiny being the only attraction as they age, it's how they learn to become people.
It’s entirely possible that market research or whatever showed that kids didn’t respond as well to the darker colors on Bruticus, so they tweaked them to be brighter to have more appeal to that base market. But they still wanted to get the darker Bruticus out there because the fans were screaming like the self-important shits they are, so they decided that an SDCC release (which, as I’ve talked about before, are not hard to get at all) was a good way to do that. Is the price inordinately high? Yes, Hasbro’s clearly gunning for more of a profit than last year with this one. But they could’ve released no darker Bruticus at all, and the fans would’ve bitched in that situation too (these are the same people willing to shell out $500+ for a chunky, kibble-ridden, parts-forming not-Devastator, mind you).
Yeah, that's definitely reverse-snobbery there, the fans that were shown a better-looking product are now what you call "self-important shits" for not wanting ugly replacement product, and for not wanting to be gouged to get the original product they were solicited.
Hasbro is trying to hedge their bets, they're using "business management" thinking rather than "toy marketing" thinking by saying "we need to have more visual appeal and variety on pegs so consumers get attracted from further away but don't get confused when they get closer", it ignores that consumers want better-looking products in general and that the TF:Generations line is one designed for a more discerning consumer base than Rescue Bots. Even without the game as context, comparing the first images Hasbro solicited of Bruticus to the second is not favorable to the latter by any stretch, it looks notably worse as a core system and as individual products.
Dom wrote:I pretty sure that Swerve is not a pick-up. But, anyway....
G1 Swerve is a pickup, he's got what looks like either a camper shell or a box in the back, kind of '60s Dodge Power Wagon pickup truck design. Generations Kup isn't a terrible fit for that alt mode, even if Kup is a smaller type of pickup truck.
This feels like Hasbro charging more for the correctly coloured toy while releasing a badly coloured toy at mass retail.
That's because that is exactly what is happening.
Anything to chill out since we seem to end up at each other's throats any time this sort of subject comes up. This is why I try not to take it too seriously.
