Every time this thread is bumped I cringe.
*cringes*

 

People have gotten so used to think of China as just being the world's sweatshop that they've missed the trend in recent years of companies turning to the Chinese market if their stuff isn't selling in America or Japan. And this works largely because Chinese consumers still crave the status of owning "foreign" goods despite the obvious fact that most of these goods are actually made in China. Transformers was one of the few 80s toy lines that was actually sold in China, despite the fact that poor Chinese parents could even less afford to buy pricey G1 bots which were expensive even by American standards. Naturally, by toy logic, this created an entire generation of kids who grew up thinking of Transformers as this unreachable holy grail, and now that they've grown up and made some money for themselves, there is a pretty significant demand for this stuff.

One of the reasons that China is so lax toward IP laws is because the authorities aren't really thrilled at the prospect of people spending so much of their money on foreign brands and would rather that money be flowing to domestically owned companies instead, but of course Chinese brands have nowhere near that level of cachet. I have no doubt that there are some pretty interesting original toy concepts being put out in China right now, it's just that nobody really cares about them because they have no nostalgic attachment to those brands, and of course everyone, even the Chinese themselves, will assume that anything made in China must be a cheap, crappy knockoff.

 

It's actually funny that I let my brainwashing get the better of my rational understanding of these things.

One of my FAVORITE product segments is Chinese-market original designs. So many of them are just filled with charm and energy that has been lost in the constant G1-Rechurn of Transformers.

 

I know nothing of guitars so I was just using your example, so you don't you don't really get to call out other posters in this thread for being snarky.

That said your example is flawed in that you equating purchasing of counterfeit goods to theft, as that is what we're really speaking of here. The colloquial term we use for KO's would in actuality most likely be used for what we use as 3rd party goods.

Now are buying counterfeit goods for transformers bad? I have no idea, I'm not in finance nor am I an economist. All I can say is that these products are around because the market dictates them. If HasTak goods were the same price as the counterfeit would the counterfeiters go even lower? maybe, maybe not.

But Hasbro reported increased revenues and an Operating profit increase for the fiscal year 2017.

So they can't be doing that bad.

I, unfortunately, can't post links so a simple google search of "hasbro profit/loss 2017" first result is where I got my info.

 

Knock offs, are they redefining our hobby?

 

Hasbro has no more entitlement to my money that Disney does.

Like Disney they have to prove to me that they are worthy of it - or I'll spend it elsewhere. Besids they don't care they already sold it to the retailer. If I buy something Hasbro and I feel I got good value I'll buy more. If I buy something like RID Combiner Force 3 Step Grimlock not so much.

 

The only things that KOs hurt are brain cells for all those mental gymnastics needed to:

1) Justify the purchase and comfort zone if you care about the moral ramifications. Dont worry guys, I dont buy KOs nor 3p I only buy Originals. And 3p kits and OS. The last two are tottaly legit and dont hurt the hobby!

2) Launch the crusade to defend the holy companies and their sacred toys. If you dont buy stamped toys you are the scum of the earth.

3) Try to convince yourselves that KOs are universally, the same soap shampoo bottles that they were 20 years ago without having touched one ever. I got a KO in 2017, (BC it was stamped made in Troy, Troy was the KO capital of action figures back then. That about Helen was BS. They attacked them because they stole the plans from Takareas factory that was producing action marbles) it was made of shampoo plastic. I now know all about KOs. They all are pieces of crap. Hur dur....Hodor!

4) Mental gymnastics needed to make you feel better person because you buy original as if it matters to anyone what brand your toys are made of. Because as it is widly known what kind of person you are, is been shown by what plastic you collect. I am awesome and cool because I have only official displays. All the girls in the hood are lining up to see them and ill be rich and famous because of them. Also the Pope declared me a saint.GENIOUS!

5) General attempts to hide ignorance all the while playing the smart guy about how companies, their mondus operandi, fanancials and R&D works. Dont worry I am sure in the 5th contradicting (with each other) attempt you will eventually hit the mark and you could pretend you knew it all along. GENIOUS!

6) Have the same 3 people who are neutral in this affair make excellently articulated statements about all the above without insulting anyone and proving actual points in a 62 pages long thread that has been cloned 143.66833167 times in the last year, and everyone (Except a couple exceptions) ignore them and continue points 1-5 for 144.66833167th time.

And now I am digging my foxhole and await for the artillery shelling.

 

Current product KOs are just a symptom of the audience's overwhelming poorness/cheapness. Fix that and KOs go back to a relatively harmless way to resolve supply and demand issues. You can hide behind any excuse you want but at the end of the day that's all it is, an inability or unwillingness to pay the manufacturer's price.

 

And you are doing the same thing as point 3. You dump them all in the same category. I seem to remember that you are selling these things right? So tell me one thing: There is no difference in your customer base? All of your customers always go for the cheap stuff regardless? The only criteria been I can afford/not/Iam a cheepskate?

 

A couple of my buddies are retailers. The stories of the frugalness of this fandom is freaking nuts. So many of these entitled morons don’t give a crap if the companies involved from the designer/maker, distributors, and retailer make any money. They could all go out of business as far as they’re concern. My favorite is when someone screenshots an eBay scammer post and asks for a price match. Or someone bitches to them when is a Fanstoys KO coming? They respond why don’t you just buy Fanstoys nothing wrong with the release. They respond back they don’t want to pay Fanstoys prices which isn’t anymore than any other 3rd party company. These cheap mofos need to stay out of MP. There are plenty of transformers lines for every budget.

 

I think it's a multi-faceted issue.

1) KO's are, for all intents and purposes, ripping off (usually by upsizing) existing figures down to the very engineering. This hurts the sellers and manufacturers since size, to many collectors, seems to be what matters most.

2) The legit third party companies will hurt themselves by trying to stay ahead of the KO makers and each other. As someone said, one company releases one thing and everyone jumps on the bandwagon. This causes a couple big issues:

A) Flooding the market with multiple versions of the same toy which, in turn, tends to devalue the originality of said figures.

B ) Many companies end up abandoning or delaying lines already in production to keep up.

Personally speaking, I would never buy a KO. If I'm going to buy, I'm going to support the company that put the thought and effort into creating rather than copying.

 

here is something worth thinking about ---
KO's were just cheap, inferior product to the original -
now, in many cases they are superior to the original -- what does that say about what hasbro is selling us ?

 

That they need to spend major $$$ getting the designs done, the testing to ensure that the toy cannot pose a threat to little Timmy and paying all those people involved.

The costs of the materials is a tiny fraction of what the final item costs. KO companies don't have any of these costs, they just steal and only have the materials and distribution to deal with.

 

This is total bullshit especially when people are paying full.price for MPM 4 and getting shit QCd figures in return.

It's saying something when a KO company fixes the QC issues the official won't even bother recognizing exists in the first place.

 

Wow this thread is alive again.

Round 10, fight!

 

True...and not (entirely) true. A very large part of the costs of a figure is profit. For the store and for Hasbro.

Take for example a deluxe and say it costs $ 15. That's the price the store sells it for, but that is with their profit and all their expenses (buying price plus employee and store costs) covered. For consumer products like toys, the difference between the price the store sells the item and what they paid themselves, is about 50 percent. That means they paid Hasbro $ 7.5 for a deluxe.

So Hasbro gets to sell the figure to the store for $ 7.5. That doesn't mean Hasbro makes it for $ 7.5. No, they too want to have profit and they have stockholders who want a share. And again, the difference between production costs and selling price will be at least 1:2. That means that with a $ 15 deluxe (store price), the production costs for Hasbro will be likely less than $ 4 per item(*). And that is the material costs, transports, the factory employees, the designers and all other expenses (salaries for the CEO and others).

And if Hasbro succeeds in reducing the production costs (less profit or less revenu for the stockholders, is a no-go), this will mean they make more profit. The cheaper they can make it, the more profit they make, because they will keep selling it to the store for the same amount and the store will sell it to the customer for the same amount.



(* Although $ 4 or less seems way too little to produce a figure for, if you multiply that with the amount made -- which will likely run in the tens of Thousand -- then it becomes another story. With 10,000 units it's already $ 40,000 to cover all expenses, and that's large 3P production: Hasbro will likely be more in the 50,000+ range, which means $ 200,000+ to cover the production costs of one deluxe design.)

 

...distribution, warehousing, and related logistics overhead are another major cost, especially for (relatively) inexpensive figures...

 

This is the song that never ends
Yes it goes on and on my friend
Some people started singing it
Not knowing what it was
But people kept singing it just because

 

My only issue with KOs is the annoying amount of emails I get at work when we get official MP Transformers in from people saying that we should be charging less than what the KOs are currently going for, and they all use the excuse "hurr durr all ko is betr kwality tahn hazblow will gadly payee $40 4 ur sealed MP TRU Soundwave nawt uh penee moar"

That being said, of all the other toys/collectibles/etc. we get in, we can't keep MP Transformers in stock for long. Granted, they're typically open-boxed, so that factors into pricing. But there are always people that also have an opposite view to the rabid KO fan, and will still be willing to buy for a good price. To quote another famous toyline, "It's Hastak or nothin'!" Granted, my place of employment only deals in purchasing pre-owned figures from people looking to unload their collection quickly, so we don't get many "sealed" figures in. So, this probably doesn't really matter in the long run since we're not like BBTS or TF-Source who actually gets sealed stock in from HasTak. Whether or not KOs exist, it's business as usual for us!

I personally own a few of the better KOs, such as a couple of the Seekers, the MP-10B with trailer, KO Ratbat, and for a while I had an OS Grimlock. Quality has been hit and miss. The Seekers blew my Takara 'screamer out of the water and OS Grimlock had some paint issues, but was otherwise perfect, while MP-10B needed some modification to get him up to snuff with my official copy of MP-10, and KO Ratbat's wing literally crumbled before taking him out of the packaging.

I haven't really seen where it hurts the prices, people still pay scalper prices on eBay, and apparently people still pre-order from the big online toy stores. But overall, I'm pretty neutral towards Transformers KOs, unless the quality is really bad (talking Dollar Store shatter-into-thousands-of-sharp-plastic-shards bad). Buy what you want! Just make sure you post pics so the rest of us on the "Show off your ________!" threads here on the Boards!