Thank you for the informative AND civil response!!! We seem to be lacking these lately...  

 

So Takara's engineers even designed all those Cybertron toys that are Hasbro-only releases? This means that Hasbro is willing to fork out the money for that in order to get more toys on the shelf while Takara thinks that stuff that's not on the show won't sell and thus specifically avoids selling toys that are available to them?

 

I believe the toys don't sell as well in Japan if the show if off the air. But then they have binaltech toys that don't even have their own show. It's odd that Takara won't sell the toys they designed. Maybe it has to do with the merger.

 

That's my understanding after a few conversations with the TF team at BotCon. Sometimes it comes out really well like Evac (to use their example) and other times not so much (like Armada Smokescreen, which Aaron said has been his biggest disappointment in development).

Of course, when you're looking at the kind of Cybertron exclusive toys we're getting and compare them to the Alt. line there's a huge difference in complexity. Heck, I still have trouble figuring out how to transform Grimlock.  

I'm told that the process of making the actual tools is really far more than the engineering designs. That's never been substantiated as far as I know, and no one's ever been able to say what percentage of the development costs it is. If anyone knows a ballpark for the percentage of development costs on that, please speak up.

Considering that the engineering stage has a lot more dead-ends, where a toy is designed and then abandoned, I'm not sure what the costs might average out to over the course of a toy line. Either way, the engineering is not going to be cheap, and unlike the tooling (at which point you know you'll have something to sell) you may not end up with anything you can use. Aaron mentioned the Rumble/spider-tank designs had been laying around for years before they decided they could fit them into Cybertron.