There's already a 12" Rancor in the wild you can get for around $60 loose. While it's not super-imposing compared to 6" figures, it can probably still get the job done for many fans.

 

Personally I hope there is never another Cookie Monster failure for HasLab. Both the Rancor and Skystriker appear to be along the lines of what those fans want from Haslab and are arounf 40% backed already. Cookie monster barely reached 20% backed and most Sesame Street fans voiced that they were wanting an actual puppet to use, not a giant statue with some pose-ability. Hopefully whatever the Ghostbuster HasLab turns out to be actually excites fans.

 

I personally don't want them to fail even if I have no interest in those items.

 

Agreed. I love the GB and SW movies. Have a soft spot for GIJOE too. And hope they succeed. I have no interest in any of them though myself to support them.

HOWEVER

If the GB Haslab is a fully functioning Proton Pack with real nuclear accelerator and a trap, and under $1,000 to back, I will most certainly do so. I have some people I’d like to lock away even though they’re not ghosts yet  

 

Obviously Hasbro doesn’t want any HasLab failures either but I think it’s been shown that it’s sometimes trickier finding a suitable HasLab project.

If it’s too ambitious, then it’s too costly and fans won’t buy. If it’s not ambitious enough, folks complain it should be a cheaper, mainline release. And if it’s too niche/obscure folks will complain that it doesn’t target their wants. It’s tough. I really do wonder what the next TF HasLab will be though.

 

The same thing was said about Galactus regarding his old Toybiz 14" figure but look how that went. He sold more than the Sentinel, and he was a troop builder where people were buying him 3 at a time. Hell Victory Saber was based off an obscure JG1 character and the US/UK/Canada orders dwarfed the Japanese orders in the end. We never know how things will turn out until the very last week or so.

 

We already know. It's going to basically be a movie prop level detailed version of the proton thrower. They showed its profile during PulseCon. What we don't know is the price and if there are any tier goals.

Before the initial first-day showing I would have suspected the Sky Striker to fail. That just seems way too expensive for such an item. As a Joe collector friend said, "WtF is a 3.75 HISS tank $25 at Walmart but the Sky Striker is $230?" But apparently the Joe fans are so starved for product that they will jump on it. However, I don't think it bodes well for their future vehicle releases. At that kind of pricing even a general release Rattler or Night Raven would cost $125-150. And if you want something like Terror Drome playset, better get ready to shell out $1k.

I think @WolverineDragon and @WishfulThinking bring up a good idea though. The Star Wars brand is starting to really lose its luster. They all but said at the Q3 meeting that it was largely responsible for the 10% drop in licensed product sales. I think the Rancor will be funded but wouldn't be shocked to see it perform noticeably worse than the others.

 

I think a likely scenario is that it gets funded but it won't get enough backers to reach all the tiers.

 

If any I think it might be the proton pack depending on the price, but I can see that all three might have distinct (though overlapping) audiences and I don't anticipate too much cannibalization. Hopefully this is just a sneak peak for the GB HasLab. I would be shocked to see Hasbro go from doing one at a time straight to three simultaneous campaigns. Launch the proton pack in early December and it might end up on some XMas lists.

 

A convention friend of mine who likes to boast about probably having the largest Joe collection on the East coast is taking a pass on this. His argument is they released a Sky Striker for $60 a few years ago and this doesn't seem noticeably different nor do the extras seem worth a $180 price bump.

 

I don’t collect Joes but if I did, I wouldn’t mind a steady release of HasLab Joe vehicles priced between $100-$250. I say this because it’s better then nothing and I would appreciate the extra detail/quality at that price point.

Basically, HasLab can become an unofficial collectors club service for the niche, hardcore Joe fan. Why not? Maybe I’m being unrealistic but I guess that’s how I’d imagine it if I were in a Joe fan’s shoes.

 

Doesn't it appear that way? They already have two in progress, and looks like their ready to launch a new one. But I'm curious as to why make Haslab GB a premium member preview when the goal is to get as many backers as possible? Wouldn't this be on a public stream then a private one?

 

Ooh. That sounds pretty fancy, honestly.

Yeah, I'm not sure why HasLab is ripping people off with it. You're right, the fans are starved and Hasbro knows it and they're exploiting it and I think it's disgusting. Don't get me wrong, it's not the same quality by any stretch of the imagination, but a lot of people LOVED those giant G.I. Joe-like sets of planes and trucks and tanks you could get at TRU. The Corps, I think is what the line was called or even a KO of it. People said it was sturdy enough and detailed enough and worked with the 3"+ figures.

When I saw the price tag, I thought it was a jet for the Pulse Zartan scale figures. I thought "Oh, that's not bad because that jet's going to be massive!" and then I saw it was a couple of O-ring figures and I was like

In all fairness, the sequel trilogy sunk a lot of the franchise, regardless of where one stands on the issue. (I personally liked the films but I'm not going to lie and say they didn't fail, overall. The return on the investment just wasn't there in the end. Either financially or with the audience and critics.) Add to that the Target exclusive X-Wing from Rogue One being over $100! (people in my local NEOH group were PISSED!) The prices are getting higher, the movies are pretty much done, the Mandalorian can only do so much, and the HasLab involving the Razor Crest is controversial due to what happened in the show, etc.

I think people are burnt out, disappointed overall, and just tired. Star Wars has been running a long time, people are ready to give up and move on. There's nothing wrong with that, sometimes people change in life and so do their passions/desires.

I wouldn't be surprised if the SW franchise ends up going to someone else down the line. Heck, The Disney Store has their own line of toys not manufactured by Hasbro, they could end up just going that route and calling it a day. (I'm not sure Hasbro would be super upset losing the license in the end. It would hurt, badly, in the beginning but they'd bounce back with time.)

 

It definitely is looking that way, minus the "this sucker is nuclear" part haha Don't know where giant Stay Puft has been coming from.

We definitely had that ambitious problem with Victory Saber as the main reason it was HasLab was due to how niche it was, not the price point. There will always be people that complain that they are too expensive though. Saw this toy reviewer online say that Galactus was worth $80 at most because 6" figures in the 90's were only $10. He was completely serious too. Some people are just really entitled.

 

Sometimes we jump ahead and like to say what the cost should be (I am guilty of this to) without fully knowing what is the reason behind those costs. Maybe Galactus is made of sturdy material that Hasbro paid a good penny to be made, etc etc. Often times we put in our own perception of it's value should be.

 

I think Mandalorian and Bad Batch shows that people can get excited for good Star Wars content. They just mishandled the films badly. Unfortunately putting your best material on a subscription service and never releasing them on disc is going to keep a lot of potential fans out.

 

I don't know if it's "entitled" as much as it's just simply "ignorance" regarding inflation and how much is budgeted into the figure's cost, along with shipping.

 

They also fail to account for the economy of scale. It is a lot cheaper (per figure) to make 100,000 than 10,000. None of the HasLab products are things that they believe would be successful at retail.

 

They just teased about the box for VS. They acknowledged no one liked the brown box for Unicron.

 

I also notice the ghost busters haslab project has 5 tiers instead of 3.