The unknowns of major events like this is why I typically don't sell my old figures/placeholders before the new ones ship. It's just too great an assumption that a 3P product that has only been announced will be on your self any time soon.

 

No it does not. In the given time period and area in question it's safe to say less die from the flu. SARS killed less than 800 over a 2 year period and was considered an outbreak. Cov-19 has killed 1500+ in less than a month and they still dont have answers. If it takes 2 years to contain this the death toll will be staggering. Watch the videos from the people of China in the hospitals. It's scary stuff.

 

Next, someone will say old age kills more people than the flu  

You ain't kidding.

 

Alright just something I think I read. Guess I was wrong.

 

Wonder if Hasbro/ takara has a secret backdoor deal with any third party company's. Just a thought.

 

Meaning? They secretly finance 3P products?

 

Sort of: stay away from character X&Y for 2 years and throw us some cash and we won't come get you in court?

Yeah, no. Otherwise we wouldn't have seen 2 fairly decent Optimius Primes released right before MP-44.

 

I think these sort of things do happen. Look at Zeta's Unicron. But both TE and MS were 6-8 months sooner than MP-44. I guess Has/Tak didn't see it coming.

 

If FT has about 9 releases in a good year and they miss out on maybe 3 or 4 months of releases from Jan-April, how do you guys think they will prioritize?

Will they try to pop out re-releases for simplicity and to recoup some capital, or prioritize new releases to keep people’s hype levels up? I’m sure they must be rethinking the year’s plan at this point.

 

Hopefully Sheridan and Thomas get first dibs.
After that, it'd be nice to get Chomp alongside a Lupus reissue/toon repaint.
And then throw a bone to the combiner folks with another Stunticon and Aerialbot.
That's six which might be it. If there's room for another, Brawn is probably a given since it's so far along.
If somehow Berserk can sneak in before the end of the year, they'd be able to close out their wave 1 Decepticon headmasters and triplechangers while checking off some of their highest demand announced figures.

If for some horrible reason they had to do more repaints and reissues than new stuff, hopefully Lupus and the Insecticons trio would get priority as their highest demand reissues aside from one of the Dibots. Man, what a setback that would be though for collectors trying to close out certain subsets of their collection with announced but unreleased figures.

 

Yeah, I doubt they’re hard up or anything but they have a lot of in demand re-issues they could release if they wanted to, like the Insecticons.

I still think they’ll get Sheridan and Hunk out first but I’d be more hyped for Thomas.

 

They could free up some more time for designing new figures also. I'm sure once this thing slows down, hopefully by April, they can start pumping out some figures. It may even be longer now though since all companies are slowed to a halt. Once shipping opens it's probably going to be chaos. Theres just no way to know what they're dealing with over there. I just hope FT can ride this out and be able to provide us with some more kick ass figures.

 

I would say that they would definitely deliver the 4 figures that are on the preorder queue: Sheridan, Hunk, Ice Man and Magnum as they will have committed orders.

I would then say reissues becomes less likely purely because the market is smaller.

obviously anything that is not already seen in colour prototype is unlikely so Chomp is still not this year. Thomas and Smokey then become the next in the list.

 

I believe Thomas has a coloured prototype.

 

Designing new figures does not appear to be an issue for them. All indications are that FT's bottleneck is factory time. This shut down will make that worse, the factory will simply have higher priorities to produce than small runs of toys. Even if the factory opens at full capacity in April (honestly my hopes are not high) it could take months before FT gets a slot to produce one figure, let alone pump them out.

If we are going purely by publicly shown progress I believe Dunerider would be before Smokey.

 

Sheridan may have already been in production before the holiday break so we may see that one come out relatively soon after things are back up and running, but then a long pause before the next one arrives.

 

That’s why I said he and Smokey are the next on the list...

 

Hehe I must have read that wrong  

 

If it was my business I'd be using this time to design while factories are down and not producing, I mean that side of the company can still function I would assume - unless designers have been personally affected by the virus. We might see 20+ new renders before we get our hands on their next figure.

I would assume Warpath and Brawn will be the next 2 and then it's anyones guess, but likely Wildrider, AirRaid, Beachcomber, Astrotrain and Dragstrip (in no particular order). I doubt we'll see reissues either because even producing reissues will take up factory time over prioritised new releases. They'll pick up the pace in time so we might get 7 new releases before the year is out providing things are running in April.

Someone mentioned Warpath being in production before the CNY, which seems feasible, so he'll ship fairly quickly /if/ that's the case.

They have something like 23/24 figures (characters) somewhere in the works so these 3 - 4 months are certainly going to slow things down a lot.

It's going to have a knock on impact on the next TFCon as well I guess (less new molds to show off - for more than just FT).

Skullcruncher is who I want more than anyone else but I guess I'll be waiting well into 2021 for him.

Maybe they should push Perceptor to the top of the list so he can find a cure like he did for the Cosmic Rust outbreak...



My thoughts go out to those in China and to their good health.

 

I believe new vs reissue isn't entirely FT's choice. It is their choice, but based on the following they can't control. The impression I've gotten is it comes down to the production window the factory gives them. If they can do a run of enough figures they do a new one, if it is a small run they do a repaint/reissue. It has not always been the case so I could be wrong on a small sample size. FT had largely stopped repaints until last year, I think they made the change after reaction to the small first runs for Apache and Koot.