That's an interesting thought. What makes you think the price is a consequence of the budget lines, vs the other way around or being unrelated?

 

I was gonna call these Gobots, but I think that’s an insult to Gobots.

 

Definitely! "Go-Bots" which is now only referred to as Machine Robo (fortunately it's not a new name) is doing great! These? Novelty at best(even know I'd buy them )

 

Because without these crappy sub lines the budgets for the main lines can be increased and given more plastic and higher parts counts to work with.

 

That doesn't follow. A toy's budget is dictated by its price point. Let me make some numbers up and see if I understand:
If you are Hasbro selling a deluxe to Walmart, you tell them: "RSP is $19.99" so walmart will generally buy X thousand toys and start selling them near that price. Walmart will buy the toys from you for let's say $10 so they can make a healthy profit and cover their expenses or whatever. So you, Hasbro, have to make a toy for less than $10 in order to make your money and pay your employees and bring in revenue. So your budget for a toy gets dictated by the price of the toy you are selling. If the company realizes they can't make the deluxe under lets say $6.00 then they don't make the toy, otherwise they'd be losing money on each toy they make. Plus Hasbro has to add into the fixed and variable costs of manufacturing the toy the money they have to pay their engineers and marketing people and designers etc and distribute that cost over the number of toys they make which takes away from the budget.

But one toy's budget won't affect the next. Let's say these Authentics toys (cheap as they are) cost Hasbro $2.00 to manufacture, with another $0.50 per toy of distributed design/engineering cost. It costs them $2.50 to make and sell these toys to Walmart. If they didn't spend that $2.50, that money would not go to other toys, because they still have a price ceiling on those toys. Deluxe Cogman costs $7.00 to make (or whatever) and they sell those to Walmart for $10.00, that's $3.00 they are making off every deluxe Cogman. If they took the $2.50 they spent on Authentics and put it into making Cogman better, that does not mean Walmart is going to pay more for the toy since they have a price ceiling of $19.99 to sell deluxe toys at. So now Cogman costs $9.50 to make and Hasbro is only profiting $0.50 per toy instead of $3.00. So you see why that doesn't make sense.

If anything, cheaper lines like this, if marketed right can ADD to Hasbro's design budgets. The engineers and designers save time (and therefore money) figuring out how to make these cheaper toys. That time can then be spent on other toys like POTP Optimus or something, the distributed cost goes down, allowing them to theoretically spend more on producing other toys. (I don't think this happens in reality, I think the company just pockets the difference).

I hope I was able to help you understand how these business decisions are made. The cheaper toy lines are designed to strengthen the brand by providing toys at price points kids from families less well off can buy and enjoy. If anything they could subsidize the design process of deluxe toys (although that is unlikely I think) they don't take away from it.

 

I'd rather have current huge non-transforming shampoo bottles that Hasbro's making for budget price points replaced with this new "evergreen" stuff.

 

I'll still buy them because I have a Transformers illness.

 

I'm not sure what you mean, can you explain it more? Which four lines are you talking about? Generations, Movie, Rescue Bots, and now Authentics?

 

Movie, Spark igniters, Generations consists of 2 toylines and 1 subline if we include the titan master and Prime Maser packs, Authentics, Crash Combiners, RID, X step changers, titan Changers, and turbo changers. That's an obnoxious list. 2007-2008 had 3 lines. Generations, movie, and universe. 2009-2010 had the same 3 lines. no useless sublines. Hasbro is using more plastic spread across all these lines then they were years ago. it's extremely unnecessary.
And as a result the figures we are getting in the main lines are lacking in engineering and detail and quality.

Ever since Prime, they've been tacking on to the amount of toylines they're making in 1 sitting.

 

You're including a lot of things alongside the categories they fall in...

 

I think you're again making the mistake of thinking that the sublines and toys aren't silo'd away from each other. I'm speaking from experience in a different industry, so it may not translate 1 to 1, but there are different teams with different resources for these sublines than on the main line. Nothing is being taken away from deluxe+ toys to design/make the cheaper toys, those cheaper lines have dedicated (smaller) teams and resources because Hasbro sees that they are selling and making money.

Reduction in parts count and paint apps is just a consequence of inflation. Think about this, in 1984 G1 Optimus Prime cost $11.49 (according to Seibertron.com) think about the complexity of that toy. Now take inflation into account. From $1984 to now, that $11.49 would be $29.20. You would be paying almost $30 for what is essentially one of these Authentics figures at retail. Now you can get Titans Return Optimus Prime for that $30, but he's way more articulated, and is a triple changer and fits into the larger titanmaster play pattern. Or looking at movie toys, people complain that the price of deluxes has gone up since 2007 when the movie toys came out, but again look at inflation. $15.99 in 2007 is $19.53
now. We are paying with essentially the same buying power, and we're getting combining dinobots.

 

Prime masters and titan masters aren't sublines within the Generations. They're accessories/price points.

Next time in this thread we'll have a claim that Deluxe and Legends are two competing sublines as well.

 

Oh I know, through Titans Return I was all about "do I buy Deluxe Hardhead, or do I buy Legends Hardhead"  

 

There might be some merit to that argument, had Transformers been a consistently reliable bastion of quality over many years. If we're going to make the case that these low-cost, low-ambition figures are hurting the brand, we're going to have to ignore so much other merchandise that Hasbro endorsed and packaged in TF branding going all the way back to late-era G1.

I think these are reasonably decent efforts, given the design mandate and the limitations that were obviously imposed on them. Unlike some of the absolute junk we've all seen clogging TF aisles over the past decade or so. Some of that stuff was destined straight for the landfill, perhaps diverting a kid's attention for the very briefest interval inbetween.

 

You're forgetting that the movie lines had a subline called "Fast Action Battlers" which were aimed at kids, plus Robot Replicas, Robot Heroes(movie with G1), et al. Also Legends figures prior to Cyberverse. Then a few of those Unleashed statue things.

The main collectors lines were far from the only things out there. Hasbro's going to make some toylines for kids, that will never change. You want to blame someone for this influx of new toys, blame retailers and their corporate buyers who get impressed at trade shows. Blame the kids who play tested with some of these toys and gave Hasbro the impression that they were on the right track.

 

fast action battlers were only for AoE. Robot heroes where only for 2007 and RotF same goes for Robot Replicas.