Can\'t wait to buy Deathsaurus 

 

It's the RG Tallgeese and the Clear version of the Crossbones lol

 

Oof, considerably more expensive than Victory Saber. That’s a bummer…

 

How much was VS in Japan?

 

Ah, that's right. Didn't I hear something about an overall price increase over in Japan recently? I swear it was on the news. Even companies that traditionally kept their prices stable for decades had no choice but to raise prices. Er... a famous beef bowl franchise, I think?

 

Yen is having a fucking nosedive atm

 

Don’t count the eggs until they hatch. Hopefully that’s another 3-5k orders, but with how the Japanese economy and yen is it may hurt how many units sell.

 

Why?

 

No they planned to open then but due to reasons we aren’t aware of the preorder page never went up on the TTMall website until the very last day of the campaign.

 

Erh, various reasons which are probably out of the purview of this discussion, but if I'm not mistaken a big part is lack of raw material to use to actually produce things. I recall that a while back McDonald's Japan had to increase the price of their fries because it was becoming so hard to secure potatoes to make them, for example. COVID really did a number on international trade.

 

I’m all in on this, but at the current slow crawl of US backers, this would fail just as hard as engine of vengeance if not for international numbers.

 

This isn't a slow crawl. Star Saber pretty much took the exact same amount of time. It didn't go over the mark until the international preorders were added in either.

 

About 3000 yen less.

 

That’s the point. The Transformers haslabs are only successful because of the international market. If it was North America/Europe alone, like GI Joe, Marvel and Star Wars, you’d need ~145 backers/day which it’s not doing. It’s the same reason they extended Unicron, which was failing and added international markets.

 

....okay, and?

 

They extended the Unicron deadline because they were having issues coordinating with international affiliate retailers as it was the first time they were doing that as it was the 3rd HasLab ever. We have known this for years now.

Of course Transformers is not as big as Star Wars and Marvel, especially in the US. You might as well be comparing it to Gundam in Japan. Transformers is this weird franchise that is a mashup of Japanese and US pop culture so it is going to be a niche thing in those countries but it is also a worldwide franchise. The fact that a character from a Japanese anime from 1989 has over 6000 backed figures so far only from countries that never even had the show on TV is great. So what that the TF community is spread out all over the world? That just means there is a universal appeal to Transformers not restrained by international borders. This is a good thing. Like you mentioned GI Joe before. That is a very US centric franchise with a fan base to match. I wouldn’t be surprised if the total non US backers for the HISS Tank didn’t even break 300 worldwide.

 

Huh?

 

The person before was saying that the only way Transformers HasLabs get funded is because of international orders like it is a bad thing. T-Hybrid was basically saying “so what?” because who cares where the orders comes from as long as the projects get funded.

 

I don't understand your point here. Transformers is an international brand, and these characters are more well known outside the US. The idea this is somehow a bad thing, is just weird.

Also, the reason they extended Unicron was due more to poor timing. The original end date was a day or two after the release of MP 44 Convoy, which was around the $500 price range. Meaning people would've been charged over $1000 within a couple of days. People were specifically asking Hasbro to extend it for that reason. As soon as they did, it jumped up pretty quickly.

 

No it has been said by leakers with insider info and by Hasbro representatives that the reason Unicron was extended was because Hasbro was having trouble coordinating with international affiliates in coordinating their orders. Hasbro didn't want it to look like they were fluffing the backers since it would look bad that a few days after the project ended it all of a sudden got a few thousand additional orders to push it past its goal. Then once it was extended the international affiliates decided to delay their orders to see if they could get even more which is why they weren't added until towards the end of the extension. Since this was the first time Hasbro was selling a HasLab through affiliates and not just Pulse there were a lot of hiccups along the way.