Hasbro shouldn't wine. If they wanted to be succesfull with this project, they should have made it better. You couldn't get 8000 backers, deal with it. The back is awful.l, dont like the panel lining.Totally not what I'm looking for.
International people cannot get their hand on it. Oh yeah, for double the price. As if it isn't expensive enough in the first place.
I'm not on the Zeta side, but Hasbro should listen to the collectors more.
If Haslab Unicron was good enough (with a better price and including intl backers), it would have got the 8000 within a couple of days.

Look at Fanstoys, they make quality products, and they are instantly sold out pretty much before they hit the streets. And they are not cheap.

Listen to us Hasbro, more G1 box reissues and toon accurate MPs. At least for me.

 

No  
But you both missed the entire CW and Titans Return lines.

 

Ignoring how incredibly elitist both of your posts I quoted sound, Titans Return and UW are the two toylines that stand out above anything else officially released.
Best articulation. Best paint apps. Best surface detailing. Most effort put into releasing characters from subgroups together. Best size. Best variety of characters. Most faithful to the G1 gimmicks.
Hasbro hasn't been able to do better before or since.
Sixshot, Triggerhappy, UW Computron, Weirdwolf, UW Superion, Chromedome, Hardhead. Each of those is amazing.

 

i said it before and i will say it again the only reason hasbro have jumped on core star is because of whinning hastak white knight fans kicking up a fuss ! the same fans that thought the sky was falling and their unicron was going to fail when the hasbro kickstarter had dropped by 10 bloody people !!! guaranteed hasbro had shit loads of emails ( and on hasbro's public social media ) kicking off from people that have a one sided selfish view to transformers collecting and there's a lot of them in the other thread ... the fact is there is room for both unicrons as both target 2 different audiences because of the size difference and the obvious one is more movie the other fits more with hasbro's seige line ! ( oh and the price not everone can afford hasbro's ) we can see that but the selfish side of our fandom wouldn't see it even if a 100 ton weight repeatedly hit them square in the face !!! i see the people that collect both official and third party have a voice of reason and can see both sides and then the white knights who are well just arses about it..... but watch them kick up a fuss if 3rd party's were to be shut down and then hastak lose sales because of all the lost collectors who decide to give up as they know they will never have a complete collection , i'm talking mp collectors here which is where the moneys at i think takara's mp line would lose a lot without 3rd party's

"edit" there are a select few on the 3rd party side that can have a single sided view but there's are more on the hastak only side

 

Now that's interesting as I'm sure I heard someone went and asked a Hasbro rep at a recent con about this Unicron and the response was "we don't want to hear about it, don't tell us otherwise we need to do something about it" or something along those lines. My guess, someone mentioned this publicly and this time they couldn't pretend not to hear because of it. That's the only piece of conjecture I'll offer in this otherwise painful thread.

 

I know you're upset and want to blame someone, but multi-million dollar companies don't take legal action simply because somebody sent an e-mail or a few people whined about it on message boards. If Zeta really did tick off Hasbro, then they did it all by themselves.

The original story was that someone asked a Hasbro rep at a Botcon some years ago about 3P and that was their response. But that story has never been more really than a case of "He tell me".

 

Ah thanks for the correction, I heard this story recently and assumed it was this thing that caused it.

 

The state of this thread!

Agreed!

Best post I’ve read on here in some time. I’m leaning more towards Haslab Unicron however I disagree with Hasbro handling of their campaign and definitely the pricing. People just have to try and be objective, it’s less stressful and it makes the fan base look for mature than the childish squabbling of which Unicron is better than who’s.

 

i think your wrong and this has a lot to do with social media and people kicking off

i can't find the screen grab someone posted about it but (as conran points out in an above post ) a hasbro rep was asked what their thoughts were on 3rd party's and he said along the lines of ""we don't want to hear about it, don't tell us otherwise we need to do something about it" we don't want to be the bad guys"

now this tells me they would have not done anything about it so it must have been the uproar on social media which they could not ignore! and people emailing them because there would have been emails

i'm not angry at this not going ahead as i have the big soldier story unicron statue anyway but more angry towards those that could not accept zeta's different unicron or accept 3rd party's being part of the hobby for many collectors

also remember 3rd party transformers have been going strong for about 10 years and in that time there has only been a couple of things they kicked off about .... and all those stores that sell both official and 3rd partys have not been asked once not to stock the obviously cartoon , comic and vintage toy inspired 3rd party from the likes of fanstoys ,xtb/kfc , mmc ect , so hasbro/takara for the most part have been ok with them coexisting! if they could accept it why can part of the tf community not accept it?

 

Something that i haven't seen anyone touch upon; What if Hasbro/TT decide to put the hurt on a 3rd party company that at the time is producing a combiner? Imagine you have got the first two and suddenly they send a cease and desist letter and said company has to shut down the project. This is only a single figure, imagine if you are invested in a Bruticus and suddenly you are left to dry. This, if true, has wider ramifications than any one of us would ever think.

I don't think it has been cancelled no matter what the Hasbro fanboys want to believe. Those same fanboys don't want to acknowledge the fact that TT and Hasbro have been producing one dud afer the other the last couple of years. The Siege line is a crapton of shampoo bottle plastic crap, the MP line has skyrocketed its prices and their QC is appaling. Meanwhile in the last two years of my collecting i have had to ask for replacement parts, maybe, five times.

 

I wonder if now there is someone at Fanstoys' headquarter saying something like "so, about that Soundwave figure we teased some time ago, do we really really really need to make it?"

 

The full figure reveals are gone from Zeta Toys weibo page. ZT is definitely feeling the heat. How much heat is the question.

 

I'm confused by this whole thing, I thought as long as a figure didn't share the Hasbro character name and wasn't a direct engineering lift, 3p companies could run riot without issue, so why has Hasbro gone after them about this it's got a different name it's a different size and it's a different engineering design?

 

Not weird at all. Unicron is THE BIGGEST THING Hasbro has in Transformers... literally. This Zeta reveal was a big shit all over Hasbro’s play to bring a monstrous work to life and deliver something that is uniquely Transformers in their own unique way. They put a lot of marketing into this, and if it doesn’t get funded, they’re going to be out a good bit of money already spent to develop and promote. Zeta was a direct threat to the success of this campaign and Hasbro shut it down because it was the tipping point. If anyone is to blame for a shift in the response to the 3P scene after this, it’s going to be Zeta.

-A.S.

 

I feel your on to something because Bobby Skullface even did a video about the uproar by fans about these Unicrons. If it is that bad as it was being portrayed in that video, I have no doubt that is what transpired. There is no way a small group of people sat by and were just spectating this, especially if they were fighting with others about Zeta's.

With those that felt the need to do that, is that you may have now derailed two Unicrons and should've left it alone. HasLab wasn't chugging along that well before the extension and Haslab should've realized their goal was and still is unrealistic, not to mention the color and some other nitpicks that seemed to be voiced to them as well.

Very unfortunate news about Zeta pulling pictures and videos now and the saddest part of all this is the fans were the ones to unravel something that could've been great x2!!!

 

Hasbro has to pay their legal department to issue cease and desist's for each individual figure, which costs money. They have to use money that's otherwise allocated for development. In most cases, third party is small enough that it's not really a blip on Hasbro's radar and it's not competing with a figure that Hasbro is actively developing, so it's not really worth Hasbro's time and money to fight it. In this case, every Corestar figure that Zeta makes is a potential sale that Hasbro doesn't make. They've already sunk money into development and marketing of the figure, so they will lose a fair amount if the figure doesn't fund. Hasbro making a copyright case against Zeta isn't cut and dry and that's probably part of the reason they don't fight more 3P, but Hasbro can definitely make a case.

 

neither of you missed anything. hasbro is targeting kids. 3p is for 15+.

 

Well said! I'll also voice this to hasbro:

Speaking for myself, your Unicron is okay but it never looked like it was worth $575 + tax. $450? Yes. If there were no other Unicron options out there would I back this at $575 + taxes? NO.

 

You thought wrong. Name is trademark, character design is copyright. Copyright infringement isn’t dependent simply on the toy’s engineering, it also encompasses the character’s design. 3P clearly utilize Hasbro’s copywriter protected character designs.

The infringement isn’t whether it copies the HasLab toy, it is that it is a derivative work of the character design itself.

 

Just gonna say it- Transformers is a brand. Collecting Transformers is a thing you can only do if you’re buying from Hasbro/Takara. Buying anything from a 3p that resembles or is meant to take the place of an actual Transformer is buying a product that steals from the owner of that brand. With that fact in place, if you choose to collect 3p, you’re collecting all the risk that goes with it, including cancellations and shut downs ordered by the true owner of the brand. Some people are rabid brand-loyalists.... but they’re not to blame here. Zeta picked a very stupid fight at the worst time possible. Hasbro wasn’t having it, and doesn’t care if you’re unhappy with that.

-A.S.