Looking darn good!  

~L~

 

So we actually could have gotten a colored box if Hasbro wanted to make it colored…. All well.

(Pic from Shartimus prime)

 

What's the sentinels box dimensions? I can't imagine it's a full cube like uni was? Maybe they saved a bit there and spent it on a colour make over?

 

I will still take cost savings over a pretty box.

 

Not sure but it is taller. The Barge was a comparable size to Unicron and was still fully colored as well. It most likely has nothing to do with actual cost.

Colored box wouldn’t effect Unicron’s price, and would save mere dollars or pennies on Hasbro’s end. They simply chose not to have it for some reason.

 

We've already been over this. Full-color gloss printing is actually VERY expensive. Getting Unicron's box printed could easily cost $50. All of Unicron's budget went into his development instead.

The other HasLab projects had more leeway in their budget allotments, since the actual toys themselves weren't as costly.

 

I have also been over this and pointed out how I could have easily ordered 11,000 colored boxes for unicron that are no where near as expensive because this shit gets cheaper the more you make. More boxes=cheaper. Idk why it ls so hard to admit they simply chose to not color it. Just like their uncolored boring selects packaging.

 

Shit gets cheaper when you make more because you subsidize the overhead. Printing materials are not overhead. They're material cost. And magazine-quality print is expensive.

The best you'll get is a service discount on large orders.

I've personally dealt with bulk print orders before. I could easily drop $500-600 CDN on a set of industrial CAD drawings, maybe 100-150 34"×22" sheets in total. And that's just laserjet quality, on basic paper stock. 90-95% black and white.

Even if you could knock it down to $20-30 a box instead of my above ballparked $50, that's still $200,000 that could instead go to tooling development, and Unicron's budget was certainly min-maxed to hell.

 

Maybe unicron did, but I hear the maxed out budget excuse on every single Figure from transformers. Its always people outside of the company to that say it’s maxed out. I have a hard time believing that after 35 years Hasbro still doesn’t know how to budget out their figures properly.

 

Not sure why it's difficult to digest that idea. Unicron's the biggest toy they've ever made, and they wanted to make it the BEST big toy they could as well. They locked their $575 pricetag, which in turn governs their budget ceiling. An extra $200,000 budget leeway spent on the toy itself, instead of earmarked for a damned box seems like the design team's dream, to me.

 

Really? We see it all the time in the main line with paint apps dropped at the last minute because they didn’t have the budget right early on.

Not saying that’s the case here and I honestly don’t care about the box. But Hasbro definitely still makes budgeting mistakes after 35 years.

 

Even high-interest accounts only do about 5,000$ in interest for every million a year.....

 

Which is a pretty bad considering they have it nailed down in all their other toy lines. They seem to apparently become incompetent when dealing with transformer budgets. Mistakes are mistakes sure, but having it supposedly be this common is poor management more so than mistakes.

 

You do understand how formulaic and standardized all their other toylines are, compared to Transformers, yes?

 

Plus, the box is probably the last thing I would be worried about when buying a toy.

 

Outside of occasionally making figures bigger or a different alt mode you’d be surprised how similar a lot of the WFC toys are.

 

Very much not the point. Superficial similarities are non-transferable. A new tooling still needs to be engineered from scratch. All the joint tolerances that are key to Transformers functionality are measured within micrometers.

Most of that work is entirely unnecessary with standard action figures. Soft PVC defies the need for precision tolerances. Joint pegs are almost entirely standardized, so it's easy to splice the basic structure into the CAD, and have your figure turn out as intended. Almost every figure has all of their anatomy built the exact same way, so there's zero guesswork as to how many parts you might need to achieve a certain design.

 

From what I saw in video reviews, the Sentinel box is much thinner than Unicron's, so maybe it costed much less and there was budget for paint. Anyway, between the box and the missing paint applications on the figure, it looks like in terms of finish Unicron got the short end of the stick. I'll take ratcheted knees over more paint every time, though.

 

Gotta agree there, those sentinel knees are a real shame.

 

Verdict is still out for long-term stability, but apparently, those with loose knees just need to pop off a joint cover and tighten a screw. Dumb factory oversight, but nothing ultimately debilitating. A bit strange that they weren't ratcheted, though, for a figure that large. But they do apparently work fine.