Nice. I really hope your maths checks out.
Personally, I suspect if the total is over 6k, Hasbro will just fudge the numbers to say it funded and proceed. They've invested a fair whack of money in this and if there are 6000 or so people that want it, they'd be crazy to disappoint them. Hasbro will have a margin of error/profit calculated in that will allow them to proceed if it;s "close" and they can always store a couple thousand and re-release in 2026 for the 40th anniversary of the movie, or slap an exclusive paint job on 'em and sell them directly in 2021 as premium 35th anniversary editions or something.
Where it will get dicey I think is if the numbers are below that 6000 number. If they can only scrape together 4000/5000 or so, they may just write it off.
(3500 on the site and 1500 from affiliates... what if that's all they can get?)
I guess we'll see in less than a week.

 

Oh no, I've been found out!

 

I thought you were a half-finished game of hangman.

 

As often as this is stated, I don't think it's true. I think the "18 months of planning" is just BSing us, a fudged number -- quite easy to do. It's not lying, but lots of companies start the calendar from the moment somebody farts out a random idea.

And they've clearly not put any effort into the marketing.

In fact, I'd go so far as to suggested Hasbro doesn't really respect the fans that much. "Here monkeys, buy this banana before we change our mind!" Because that's really the entire gist of the project. "Buy it now, or you'll never see it again! Mwhahahaha!" (Use your best cartoon villain voice here.  )

 

To me it's less the time spent and more what we do know they have. The toy is, for the most part, designed, so I have to imagine they paid someone for that. It's probably something a corporation of their size could easily swallow, but it's something.

 

In principle, I agree with this. Hype for Unicron is very high among some of Hasbro's most hardcore of fans and loyal customers. Hasbro's marketing job to get the word out has been crap, but for us, the most harcore and discerining fans, I can't recall a Transformers that's caused this much buzz. MP-44 Optimus Prime v3, the most show-accurate Optimus ever, is coming out in a few days too, and it's been reduced to a blip because of this.

It's gotten to the point where if this were to fail, it would be a disaster for the line among hardcore and dedicated fans. It would be the most high profile and most desired unproduced TF ever. I think it would also be an inflection point for the line: it would indicate that G1 CHUG fans should probably start winding it down, and look towards MP, because there is now a hard limit on where the line would go.

Purely hypothetically on my part, but I think if Unicron ends up coming slightly short (like 7400), Hasbro would just fill in the remaining 600 and try and get them distributed to partners and other retailers for people who want one but didn't pre-order. I doubt the'd do that if it were like, 1500 short. But in the mid hundreds? Yeah I see it. The cost of not doing so would be too high for such a marquee item.

Regardless I think it's going to be close. If it gets funded, I think it'll be just above 8000. Like 8600. I'd be shocked if it did anything close to what the Sail Barge did, which was 176% of its target. It'll probably do like 110% tops. And if it's short, it'll be like 90%.

Personally, I don't like this Kickstarter model at all and I think it's pretty irresponsible for Hasbro to do. I'd much prefer if they said "we're making a premium Unicron. It will cost $650 and we're only going to make 8000 of them ever, so you better buy it". They'd make all that money back. Maybe not as fast. But they'd make it.

 

how much do you think plastic costs? do you have any idea how cheap plastic actually is?

i mentioned it already in this post here (Haslab Unicron), but here's part of what i wrote:

"Transformers are made almost entirely out of ABS plastic (acrylonitrile butadiene styrene); some parts may be different kinds of plastic (such as polycarbonate for clear areas, PVC for vinyl "rubber" tires, etc.), but the bulk majority of it is ABS. a quick bit of research shows that raw cost for ABS ranges anywhere from $500 to $5k per TON (which is 2,000 lbs, or 2,205 lbs for metric ton) - that comes out to $0.25 to $2.50 per lb of plastic..."

 

Fans also need to realize that part of that time will be spend saying "now that's it's designed, where can we cut some corners to lower our costs". Noting that this often happens after consumer pricing has been set, so it wasn't for our benefit. It's not as if all 18 months were spent on the actual product. A couple months (at most) of engineering sketches, then some failed prototypes, sketch changes, some good prototypes, and here we are.

Designers are surely part of a separate budget covering salaries. It's not like they pulled in a special outside team for this, had to pay them separate from the project budget. That's just not how corporate budgeting works. (Corporate/office budgeting in itself is an art.)

 

I figured, I'm just thinking of what they currently have to pay for. It's not a ton all things considered, but there's some stuff they'd have to swallow if this falls through.

 

Again, they also probably invested basically nothing in this. They've had employees work on it for 18 months or so as part of their job. They made some low quality proof of concept prototypes from a 3D printer (that mostly featureless but transformable Unicron). They engineered it on a computer and produced a high quality 3d printed prototype with all that surface detail and the parts as they'd actually be in the final version. This high quality 3d printed prototype was hand painted and hand assembled.

We know all the above because I am describing the process they illustrated in the video for the sail barge before it went into production.

The next step is where things get expensive. They'll have to make tens of molds for injection molding by buying steel blocks and having the negative of every part carved into them. They'll also have to stand up the supplier logistics base for all the screws, pins, fasteners and whatever else goes into Unicron. Unlike the main line figures, there will not be much if any recycling of these things from other parts of the line.

In the future when 3d printers are better... yeah, we'd probably get Unicron faster. But as it stands now, 3d printing doesn't hold a candle to injection molding, which means it is actually going to take the year and a half to get all the aspects of actually making this thing together.

I think to date, employee pay aside, they've spent probably less than $10,000 on Unicron. And most of that would just be in raw materials for making their prototypes and marketing. But what comes next is very pricey, which is why they are asking for the $4.6 million up front, rather than charging on delivery. Because they want to assume no risk for this massive item. Some fraction of that $4.6 million will go into the molds, the logistics and everything involved in mass producing this thing. But if Unicron fails, then they've spent basically no money, so have no risk or liability to it.

 

and ultimately what they have spent, should this fail, can be chalked up to market research, which in and of itself is valuable

 

Sometimes liking posts is not enough. Spot on.  

I do, however, think a lot of posters put too much emphasis on injection molding costs. Yes, it costs money. But most of that $4.7M figures isn't for that. As you state, a fraction. There's way to cut corners, cut costs here as well. And lets not forget, it'll be using foreign labor, not domestic. I really would not be surprise if 50%+ of that was just profit, because Hasbro wants guaranteed ROI. This isn't an NPO, not fan service.

Pffft. What market research? They've really not done jack sh!t on this front. The marketing efforts have been worse than what I've seen in college marketing course projects.

 

For me, the mold costs represent less why they need exactly how much they do and just a barrier as to why they can't produce much less than they are currently without it being worthwhile. I remember reading the idea of a 500 piece limited run, but to me the sort of "flat rate" cost of making this thing makes much smaller runs very difficult.

Correct me if I'm wrong, I think we estimated based on Metroplex that about $200,000-$500,000 would go into molds for this toy.

 

True. The reason I highlight it is because seeing those two Unicron's may make people who don't know the process think "well they've done everything already... they're just being greedy... why do we have to wait 18 months". They need to understand that those 3d printed, hand painted, hand assembled prototypes are only representative of the final product, but not actually the final product. All the steps in making the actual toy, rather than a glorified custom, come next. As of right now, the most amount of work they've actually done is virtually... on a computer, in a CAD program, in the thing that will be turned into those molds. And that's cheap. That's just Takara and Hasbro employees working on a computer.

 

honestly, you're nothing but rhetoric and agenda. you constantly come up with inane conspiracy theories. the market research would essentially be how much the hardcore collector is willing to pay for a percieved value. this thread in and of itself is an excercise in market research that hasbro doesn't actually have to pay for, we are giving it to them for free. how many people have said that at this price it should have voice clips or leds? how many people have said this or that about it? if the right people are reading this thread then the entire this is market research, along with everything else about it online. you keep talking about how hasbro is so cheap and always looking to cut corners, why pay someone to perform market research or even marketing in general when an online community of nerds and collectors will do all of that for them for free?

 

Again, WTF?  

I'm here because I don't know if I want this. After posting for weeks, I finally decided to NOT do it last week, and wrote my reasons why. A big reason was space. Other reasons, but space was the biggie. Well, I may have space after all. So, to quote myself, "fuck". Not any easy decision.
- If I don't do it, I may regret it.
- If I do it, I may regret it.

While here, while we're all using each other as a sounding board on why to (or not to) buy, and while some shared why they've already bought, I have been correcting some of what I know to be nonsense, sometimes just off/inaccurate, based on my professional backgrounds, on aspects that have some overlap in this very topic. You apparently have disagreements with facts, not me.

You think this thread is market research? Really?! Pffft. That's really funny. No.  

 

Ya know, at this point you aren’t even worth paying attention to, have a nice life

 

Any designers working on Unicron are not working on something else. I doubt HasTak has dedicated R&D people who just work on proofs of concept and such; more likely, they were just normal design staff pulled aside for this. So, salaries aside, the cost of their involvement is also having to reduce the number of other things in the design pipeline or having to hire new designers to replace them. And all this is worth a lot more than $20K. My salary may not be high, but I commonly contribute a significant % to projects that my company charges upward of $200K to customers. So, when I have to do something else, they have to reduce the number of such projects.

 

A part of me wants to believe that all these pissing fights on the TFW forums are being directed by Michael Bay. Kind of entertaining, not really, actually pretty terrible dialogue... but hey there's a transformer in the middle of the story so it's okay!

 

It can’t be Michael Bay, I can actually make out what’s happening in the Unicron videos.