I think you are a bit misinformed. It was Hasbro who took a failing line of generic transforming toys and created an ENTIRELY original mythology with marvel writers who started it all in comic books.

Hasbro and Marvel deserve all the credit for the creative IP of Transformers NOT Takara Tomy. While I love the engineers/designers at Takara Tomy they are not a creative IP media company.

 

How can a man be this clueless. Unless you are joking.

 

TF Prime Airachnid, Hasbro has not yet paid me an adequate number of souls to earn my forgiveness for her yet. That is all.

 

It has nothing to do with increasingly restrictive DRM, "Disney Vault" sales strategies, lower-quality discs pressed in Mexico that are scratched right out of the case, DVDs being 3-4 seasons behind the TV schedule, the death of rental outlets, or anything else? I'm also kind of curious which animation studio this is, because so much of the actual animation is farmed out to the far east and has been for decades, even though I know you can't tell me.

 

I think the biggest problem is that Hasbro has no idea what's going on at retail not the trends and such but they don't understand that people aren't stocking the shelves.

I e-mailed a Playmates rep the other day about how there are no stores stocking Ninja Turtles, he said they were shipping them and I told him how it has been a month since stores in my area had anything this was from AL to GA.

He e-mailed me that his local TRU was empty as well, people keep saying it's because of resets and post Christmas drought but it's never been this bad across so many stores.

I worked in the meat Department at Wal-Mart and when craft or those companies had no sales for a day or 2 they sent out people to find out why and if we didn't have the product in from our trucks they came in with it themselves and put it out.

I don't understand why toy companies don't seem to have the same system.

I know they sell to stores and retail isn't their job but it seems they would realize if no one puts out their product and doesn't care about counting the on hands at large stores that it will kill them at retail.

 

They made her for me. I'm THAT evil. You better believe that I love her and all of her wicked toy ways.

 

I'd be down for Transformers to have a Skylanders-like treatment, but not as stationary statues. Keep Transformers they way they are, but have some tiny infrared sensor on the figure that can interface with a video game. That way you have the physical toy you can play with, but you can bring your collection into the game itself.

 

I think one factor you haven't included there is physical space. DVDs and BluRays (while awesome) take up an ever-shrinking amount of physical space that people have in their houses or flats. Digital Storage however, is cheap and the ratio of floor space to content is massive: I have a file server here at home with about 8TB of space in it. I can expand that to some really mind bending levels without it taking up anymore physical room than it does now and it contains about three bookshelves worth of our home DVD collection. I spent hours ripping and encoding my DVDs of Star Trek, New Tricks, Stargate SG1, Yes Minister, Fawlty Towers and our collection of movies from the past decade or so. Its the same with my comic books: aside from a few classics like Kingdom Come, Killing Joke and the like, all my comics are on my iPad. If i was storing them in my flat, they'd be up to the roof by now.

Digital models are imperfect since the hardware can die, your subscription can be revoked and a myriad of other things, but as housing prices go up and people look to smaller and more manageable living spaces, this becomes a concern.

 

Agreed 100%....this is all it boils down to right here.

 

Actually, as someone who deals with Chinese factories for production, I can tell you that his number is a bit low. They aren't made for 15¢, it's more like $2. We also saw a screen shot of a Wal-Mart computer screen someone posted ( can't remember which thread it was in ) showing their cost, and it was around $7 I think. So Hasbro might make $5 on each toy, which has to cover their overhead. The giant building in RI, the designers, Takara's cut for the engineering work, etc. All that stuff isn't free. They're surely making money, but it's not hand over fist like he says.

 

Well, it's not quite that simple. Most American corporations have become obsessed with shareholder profits, above and beyond anything else. Even the consumer to some extent.

There has been a culture of trying to push larger profits every quarter on into infinity, Up, Up, Up!

It's unrealistic and short sighted, but it makes sense when you think about a new CEO coming in and wanting to make a splash, make as much profit as possible for his share holders and grow the company at almost any cost.

They are business minded not necessarily always toy lovers or creatives.

In the entertainment biz, we have "creative" producers or execs. They almost always have business degrees from one of the ivy league schools, and almost always have NO clue about film or the creative process, what makes a great movie or franchise.

They are intellectuals(theorists) without any real consequential knowledge.

 

While I know that his numbers were just "filler numbers" for the sake of argument, in the end, the point is still the same.

Instead of them making (again, filler numbers here) 1.23 million in profit last year, ol' George calculated wrong and the promotional team didn't do their best, the economy still sucked and so on, so profit came in around 1.11 million....man, I was counting on 1.23....

And so the cutting gets deeper.

You really think they got rid of twist ties to "help the environment" and make the consumer happier?...I guarantee you that string is way cheaper than the wire ties....they've been cutting for years, but some are just now starting to notice it, because the cuts are starting to show in the actual figures, like cheaper plastic, less paint apps, etc.

 

Ya know... I've suggested it before. Get a scout class figure and put a chip in it... but of course, it wasn'twell received. People would always find some reason to defeat it.

 

I agree with most of this... and would like to add how they can make profits while STILL releasing mass quantities to discount store to be sold for half of what Wal Mart sells.