Way too many

 

You count recolors? G1 or everything?


500+

 

I found a feature on TFWiki that lists all pages, so someone with the time and willingness to navigate it could give us an answer.

All pages - Transformers Wiki

 

This is probably the most accurate guess in this thread. And it's in blue text for some reason.

 

That rapidly approaches 'count the number of grains of sand on the beach' territory, to be honest.

 

"Actually, Detective, we have counted. 2,56,986,000..." -Ra's al Ghul

 

Maybe he wants to write some profiles alla Godzilla Neo, and he is going for all characters.

Maybe he likes to write a revamped story and include all the characters.

Maybe he'd just like to know the number.

Maybe he's on a death quiz and has to answer the question correctly or his 7 Big sisters and 3 Big brothers are going to fail they're free trial for the BMV at the BEA.

 

Over 9000!!

 

This is the ultimate question!

So the answer must be 42.

 

Well if you're counting how many characters there are just remember, Submarauder and Gilmer are two completely separate characters that look identical as do Bomb-Burst and Blood.  

 

There are theoretically infinite Transformers characters.

 

Not sure you can really count them. Same way it's tough for anyone to give a definitive count of figures in someone's collection. How do you qualify a character? Are headmasters two characters or one? Are combiners five characters (for most combiners) or six to include the combiner as well? What about guys like BattleTrap. One? Two for the now two separate robots? Or three? Do you count the unnamed seeker color variants or any other unnamed characters? What about guys who have had a name drop in some fiction but never had any actual design, figure, or even face shown?

 

High Moon asked the question of Hasbro once and talked about how they never got a good answer. They wanted to know for various reasons such as how many evacuee ships should be in the exodus from Cybertron animatic.

After I heard about that, I was curious myself, mostly for the idea of population density as well as if they had planetary colonies, how many people would be on those planets as well for a total civilization count for worldbuilding purposes. In addition, depending on how many were on the planet to how many are around during the "later" stages of the war informs for a story about just how tragic their conflict is. Much like how in the comics when Ratchet and the others are discussing how new Transformers in the early days of the war had to pass 14 criteria to be considered made and functional before being shipped off to war, later that was reduced to 7, then again in the last days just to get more soldiers out faster to replace losses shows what a "meat grinder" the conflict had become.

The sticky wicket for trying to estimate the population isn't the varied continuities, it's the "disposable" class in each series. Autotroopers, Vehicons, Seekers, and other assorted fillers for series and games that uses shared body types to fill out the ranks to add to the population without needing every character to be a named "somebody". Take Prime for example, which only had 8 regular Decepticons and used Vehicons to fill ranks, there was a guy who kept track for a while on the forums as to how may Vehicons we saw die and the number was quite high before he quit watching (200+ if I recall correctly). The nameless serve as the bulk to the population and remain uncounted, thus making it really hard to get a grasp of the Cybertronian population.

Anyway, as for actual named characters, it is a bit surprising that no one has gone through and tabulated them, but I would expect it to be around 1,200. Named toy characters, fiction only characters, Transformers only, no nameless masses.

 

That's difficult.
Are we talking about one specific continuity, or all of them? How about all the different versions of say Optimus Prime throughout the multiverse? Also tons of convention characters, characters being treated as separate individuals (Megatron and Galvatron in some universes), also characters we never been featured in any official media outside of toys.
I don't know if anyone counted how many characters are exactly in the franchise, and it's really hard. That's like trying to name every Marvel character throughout the multiverse (and video games, movies, tv shows, and even radio dramas are considered canon to the Marvel multiverse.)

 

Well the G1 cast — Bumblebee, Drift, Windblade, Rack’ n’ Ruin, Rung, Bulkhead, Arcee, Optimus Prime, Lugnut, Clobber, Megatron, and Blitzwing — is 12 characters, so 12 + any that I’m missing... My guess is 14.