It has to be Fansproject City Commander. It has had multiple runs, been KOed and was released before the glut of 3P companies diluted all our spending.
It has to be City Commander: He was the first serious 3rd party project. He had multiple runs and is still being KO'ed. He was very reasonably priced (first run was around $75 IIRC). He added value to a previously unpopular and unwanted figure. He was an original design. Even Hasbro employees bought him and displayed him in their offices. He didn't try to replace an existing official figure. He STILL looks good on a shelf, almost a decade later.
Interesting, thanks for confirming! So does anyone have any clue what the production size was for City Commander? 9,000 units seems like quite a few! That's certainly more than I imaged. Also makes me quite happy to own a grey Quakewave as well, considering that there were only 350 of them made, I believe.
lol, I came to say City Commander, but then see everyone above me. So 9,000 "people" wanted Quakewave first time round huh. I thought it'd be less. Assuming those still chasing and those not wanting are equivalent to double dippers, I reckon that has capped out the adult market at around 10k collectors. Batch sizes can be as small as 400 something else to think about... You give away too much info D.
Not to harp on that product, but I doubt this. I'm sure I wasn't the only one wary of Apollyon being more or less a KFC product and who waited to see if it had QC issues. It does, which scared me away from buying.
If there was 9k quakewaves sold and now there's another 2 coming out that aren't limited if say that make it out to a total of 13k that have already been preordered and a possibility of 20k if all are sold.
No wonder there are so many 3P coming out trying to cash in. If you have a hit product then it seems like you can clear over a million dollars in revenue. I'm surprised at the numbers. Use to be high runs were maybe 2000 or 3000 units. And maybe that still is the case for your average first run.
Those are pretty big assumptions though. I have zero actual idea, but I'd ballpark the double-dippers at no more than 1k and "still chasing" as at least 2k (new fans and fans wanting to move more into MP that weren't going to commit before). That alone puts you at 10k fans, but really only fans that are going for a complete MP collection. There must be a fair chunk that only want certain characters, didn't like that offering, or are putting money elsewhere. I imagine the market is at least 15k, but no product will get everyone to purchase it. The number I'd REALLY be curious about now is how many, say, Wheeljacks were produced. Are the production runs of an official product all that different (at least for the higher end items...not combiner wars stuff, etc)?
When I first saw this thread, my initial thought was "it's gotta be City Commander." However, I didn't realize Quakewave had as many runs as it did. I guess there's no way for us to know for sure which third party toy has sold the best.
Really? I would have thought more, to be honest, purely on the basis that I wouldn't imagine Quakewave's disctibution as being circa 9-10% of a typical TakaraTomy MP release. If that were the case, I think that perhaps TT might be paying a bit more attention to the 3P scene than they currently are. Of course, I could be wrong, although I am at least assuming that the production numbers of official MP releases have increased significantly over the last few years.
Impossible to tell. I'd put Feral Rex and Hercules above all others, due to them being multiple members with multiple runs each. Some Feral Rex limbs are on their 3rd run soon folks. But then again, we are comparing what appears to be unknown production runs. If I recall correctly, typical hasbro deluxe [around the movies era] was circa 150k units? I would not put the TT cars over the 50k range, personally.
100K range would be widely distributed, cheaper toys aimed at kids...star wars and go Joe's for example (and maybe main line deluxe TF). MP cars are probably in the 20 to 30K range.