I don’t mind exclusives at all... but I’d prefer they be things that normally wouldn’t sell as well at retail like the SG Ratchet and Prime, G2 Sandstorm and Megatron, etc. I hope we don’t get LESS cool things like that.

 

I am not a toy business expert (unlike many of these boards... I kid, I kid!). But I do not understand the bloody-minded determination to launch a new line every new year. I know a lot of this line business is performative for the retailers. But people have been pretty happy with the first two chapters of the trilogy and it seems like if they need more time to roll out the product, why not take it? I know that the larger price-point figures need to be out at a certain calendar period in order to push to retail for holidays (though they seem to be increasingly AWOL at retail currently, with Target apparently clearancing Scorponok if you can find him. But given the way they shuffled around some of the end-run Siege figures, it seems we're revisiting that timeline again and now fourth wave figures are nowhere to be seen with third wave figures slowly edging toward retail (though who even knows now). They pre-prainted so many figures that they seem to have completely screwed themselves with getting what they want out to retail.

 

Me neither. Like you said, I’m fine with more obscure characters and designs, I just start to take issue when core cast characters get relegated to exclusives.

 

My reasons are likely different. I’m more concerned that putting core cast as exclusives bumps out obscure characters we could have had instead. I have no intention on getting most of the core cast... again.  

 

It's pretty clear that Earthmode Ironhide, Ratchet, and Prowl, and probably Bumblebee were supposed to be main line and got shunted to exclusive.

 

In case you guys didn't see it:

Buy/load $40 in Amazon gift cards, you get a $10 promo credit added to your account.

Prime day deal for Prime Members, expires 11:59 PM PST tonight.

Go to you account, click on 'gift cards', then 'purchase gift cards' and you will see the promotion link and details.

 

@grune7 @ziltama thanks guys sadly it's available but only on amazon.com so if i order there I have to pay an obscene shipping fee   As i said outside the US getting figures is a nightmare

 

Asian market stock should be available next month but that could be even more expensive.

 

It's not up to Hasbro. It's up to retailers. Hasbro designs lines with what they think retailers would like, and offers waves, but it's up to retailers to order those waves. And that's done based on the sell through of the wave preceding it. What a retailer doesn't want is "shelfwarmers". To us, they're a curiosity, but to a retailer, especially for an expensive item, it's a mistake. Through sales data (historically) and now algorithimically, retailers can track how products move and make determination for orders off of that. The other factor is that Hasbro shows lines / waves to retailers and they have well sell them depending if it fits their vision of what to sell. To offer two historic examples that matter:

- MPM-08 Starscream was put on the shelves at Target in late August for $150. And it did not move at all. Why would it? Unless you're an adult fan of the movie franchise, it's ugly. Certainly not a kids two. But there you had on the shelf, at least 2, and sometimes 4 of these things. Target's sales algorithms noticed it wasn't moving, so by mid September (about 3.5 weeks of shelf life), mass slashed it to $75 to try and move units. Then about a week ago, it was slashed again to $45. Product that is new sells, and product that "shelfwarms" simply won't. So Target is trying to get what they can off Starscream to move it off the shelves.

- Back in late 2010, between ROTF and DOTM, the tail end of the hard-to-encapsulate Transformers (2010) line was skipped by major retailers and relegated to TJ Maxx, Marshalls, and so forth. This saw some figures canceled and others extremey hard to get. This was because TRU, Target and Walmart wanted to phase out the inter-movie line in favor of the new Dark of the Moon line. Movie Tie in = more sales. And in general they saw it as movie product sells more than other product. At least it did

We saw a change in this over the course of the past few years. The movie lines were once the centerpiece of Hasbro's product slate, with "Generations" being the filler that sold worse and retailers accepted to keep Transformers on the shelves between Michael Bay productions. But that changed with Age of Extinction, and by the time TLK came around, Generations had proven itself to be a strong seller through Generations (2014), CW and TR, that it was allowed to continue standing on its own two feet and the movie was product was done largely ancillary to the main Transformers product, which also included RID2015.

But Hasbro is smart. Smarter than retailers when it comes to their product. Studio Series offered another movie-centric revenue stream - very attractive to retailers because movie tie in - but they weren't particularly discerning about what was in it., Which is why we've gotten loads of Constructicons, in a hugely ambitious collector friendly product that otherwise badly shelfwarms. It's also why we're getting Kingdom (with it's 1986 cast characters) and Studio Series '86 at the same time as Unicron. Don't be surprise when Siege Springer gets repacked minus battle damage in Studio Series '86 wave 2 or something. From the retailer perspective, it's more studio series. From our perspective and Hasbros, the entire movie cast except Galvatron and Ultra Magnus is on the shelf simultaneously (and Galv and UM are later in 2021).

So that's the north star as to "why". Because new lines sell better and are attractive to retailers than old lines. And it all may sound stupid, and few people may actually care, but if it increases sales even a little, it's a rationale to do it. But is it kind of BS from an "organization" point of view? Yes. And the sell is that in Siege, most if not all figures that were "Cybertronian modes" of characters they expected to do Earth mode and other versions of, were lathered in battle damage, while "one offs" of characters who may have had their first figure in 30 years had very little, if any. Hasbro understands this is kind of BS too. But it's business.

 

Dang man! That's got to be the best explanation for what is going on that I have ever read! I think you may have just cracked the code to the Matrix!

 

Thanks for the heads up. I know I'll spend $40 in the near future if not to gift it away. It's a free $10!

 

I'd like to add to this: People have this misconception that retailers actually understand what they sell. They don't. Usually the Toy Buyer isn't someone who is passionate about toys... they are a random person who knows how to read charts about trends. They have little understanding of the collecting market.

A perfect example: two years ago a retailer I will not mention the name of invested heavily in a new CGI movie that was coming out because when they met with the reps for the toy company that produced the line they told them "Oh, this will be HUGE!" and said retailer had gotten burned because they missed out I believe it was How to Train Your Dragon 2 figures and their rival got them in first and made a ton of money. So they invested HEAVILY. All the charts said that CGI movie toys sell BIG!

...it was the Emoji Movie.

People on store level, the few that DID know about toys, warned them to STOP SENDING US EMOJI MOVIE CRAP (actual quote I saw) but no one listened... and they lost a TON of money on that.

 

Not dead yet - it's back up at MSRP.

https://www.amazon.com/dp/B07P2JB241/

 

Great post.

 

Bahahahahahahahahaha!!!! And in full force! Amazon be like:
  Oh just die already!!!!

I past on this thing, and still have no plans to get it! 
I guess now we know why Amazon never ordered enough Cone Head 2 Packs! 

 

Yeah, this is important to add. They have a conception of what they need, and what moves, and a broad conception of what kids are interested in but zero understanding of the specifics of a line in the way even a casual fan would.

Here are some great examples for folks reading these posts.

Marvel Legends is perhaps the ultimate example of this. Hasbro puts out a dozens - maybe over 100 - Marvel Legends out per year through broad releases and retailer exclusives. But the bread and butter is the 6-8 figure waves. You know, the Avengers wave, the Spider-Man Wave, the Deadpool wave, the X-Men wave and so forth. Retailers want product in these general categories, and Hasbro tries to both offer tie ins to recent or relevant material (i.e. the Gamerverse stuff, movie figures) or do figures they think will move for both collectors and kids. Case in point, the Age of Apocalypse wave. AoA was a crossover that came out 25 years ago, so over twice the age of the target demographic of Marvel Legends. But look at the line. They're all colorful and cool looking. And you have a Wolverine in it. And a Jean Grey. And a cool fire dude named Sunfire. And a Beast. You have a bunch of core X-Men in there. So to a collector, you have "Weapon X wolverine", but to little Timmy, it's just Wolverine in a different costume.

Another great example is Hasbro sneaking in these Rob Liefeld X-Force design action figures into their Deadpool Waves. Deadpool = movie = popular marvel property. That's what the retailer sees. The retail doesn't see or cre that Sunspot is in a costume he wore for about 30 issues, in the early-mid 1990s.

Conversely to use, it's also why (and I wrote about this before), your ONLY chance to ever get a classic costume White Queen / Black Queen (Selene) is through the Hellfire club set. Marvel legends does semi-skimply clad women. Superhero faire though. Psylocke's classic costume is probably the limit. By comparison the new mold corset and overall dominatrix look of White Queen / Black Queen is objectively too explicit for any retailer. They'll look at Wolverine in some obscure costume and go "check, no problem". Then they'd look at the White Queen and wonder wtf it is. They aren't terribly discering, but they do "catch" stuff like that.

More relevantly to us Transfans, I think, is the Bumblebee line. Consider the TR Soundwave Rredeco and the cassette pack. It was an appreciated tie in to the movie sure - Soundwave is in it in a semi-g1 form for about 20 seconds. But he doesn't Transform. But he's in the movie. So suddenly... movie figure! So they now can budget a G1-style remold of him and they release his casettes to go with him. And COINCIDENTALLY (not really), they just so happen to release a blue Frenzy/Rumble (always Rumble to me) to go with the red one that got released earlier. So to a retailer, Hasbro offered a $50 price point toy of a movie character and a $25 acessory / figure back. To us collectors though, you either got a more G1 Soundwave and/or you got the cassette they skipped over in Titans Return.

Retailers really have no clue what is being offered, but Hasbro is very smart nowdays and understands all the different audiences they serve - kids, teenagers, young adults and collectors. And they release product that has all appeal to subsets of different audiences to create more sales than if they just targeted one. Again, Age of Apocalypse Weapon X was "Wolverine" to lots of kids... but to people in their mid 30s, it was the first Weapon X figure in 15 years, and second in 25 years.

This is the exact reason many people here said over a year ago that "whatever WFC Part 3 is" (which we know is Kingdom now), it was gonna have a Rodimus, Kup and a Galvatron and a Cyclonus and a Scourge. It would have a Blurr and an Ultra Magnus maybe too. Because Siege had Ultra Magnus, Springer, Earthrise we knew would have Arcee (Quintessons were rumored), and Unicron was coming in 2021, and they were going to release tie in products for that which were simultaneously just new products of characters they wouldn't have done in 5-6 years. Though it turns out Kingdom is half Beast Wars (though it must be repeated: half not), sure enough, between WFC Part 3 and the companion Studio Series 86, Hasbro is doing exactly what everyone prodicted, just split between to lines. But to the retailer, it's two lines.

In short, and I honestly can't believe we finally get to say this, if you want to make predictions about what figures Hasbro is doing, thinking like a fan or a collector is a reliable way to go about it now within reason (and this is the reverse of just a few years ago). Getting back to Marvel Legends, with the release of the Psylocke / Fantomex / Nimrod pack, you can take the bank that in 2021, we're gonna get an "Uncanny X-Force" redeco of Archangel, and whenever they do an Age of Apocalypse Wave 2, AoA Nightcrawler will be counted among them - and they'll release an exclusive redeco somewhere of him in his Uncanny X-Force costume. I don't have secret knowledge, but this is exactly how Hasbro things.

Still don't believe me folks? You notice that Hellfire Club set on pulse has Magneto helmet that nobody can wear? Some reviewers have postulated it's a call back to X-Men: First Class. It's not. It's so you can use on your Magento/Quicksilver/Scarlett Witch 3-pack from last year, which only had helmeted heads that had the crest on helmet painted purple. Some artists did that, but many left it red too. If you're more of a red-crest Magneto fan, you can just rip the helmet off your figure and use the one in the Hellfire Club set. That's how fan-friendly Hasbro is now. It's nuts.

 

I have a question for those of you (US residents) who has bought from AMAZON JAPAN very recently;
Can you check your invoice to see if they are collecting tax now?

 

Haven't seen any on mine lately.

 

How recent was your latest order from AMJP? Less than a week? In stock item or preorder?

 

My last orders were BFB EX-01 Nicee(was a 3rd party seller fulfilled by amj) & MP-50 BW Tigertron. Within the last 2-3 weeks or so.
Nothing on my preorder for MP-52 SScream.