This could prompt MT to cancel their Citybots line entirely. Pandinus will probably come out, because they've already invested so heavily in the tooling, but Trypticon and Fort Max are probably not happening now.
This person does not understand logic. At the end of the day, its a small company and eventually people will not want to make figures anymore because there is no money in it. A person has to have ethics and a conscious and even some integrity, which some people don't. Even the Mafia had The Commission. I guess things are still like the wild wild west. Even though I want to buy the OS Feral Rex, I don't think I will because its trending down a wrong path. The OS MP-10 I bought because I knew there was not a chance in hell that Takara would put one out. Also, the 3rd party market provides Takara with market research for free. I think from the 3rd party perspective they gotta start guarding their stuff better and get more trustworthy factories.
At this point Maketoys has realized just about everything they would get out of that mold. Most of the retailers have surplus, they did a recolor/remold with no sign of doing another. I don't think it will impact their future endeavors.
I've seen so many statements recently like this from people that KOs don't hurt because X company has already made their money back from a particular mold. That's just incorrect and short sighted. It's not just about one KO. It's about what happens down the road once people start buying these KOs. the KO companies will start making more KOs and cranking these out faster. Many people will wait and pay 1/3, 1/4 the price for the KO rather than the original. 3rd parties will be less likely to make an investment in a major project like this because it's less likely they'll be able to turn a profit.
I'm down for a knock-off of Utopia, as I already have the real Utopia and Dystopia! I'm fine with a knock off for a third one, just because I want to get some modifications done on it, and a knock off will hopefully be WAY less painful (financially!)
If the KO companies had the ability to pump these out faster and easier, they'd have already done so and completed directly with earlier releases.
I love MakeToys, but how sorry am I supposed to feel for them when their Utopia was built around ripping off another company's IP in the first place? Life in the big city. Sucks for them, but this is the wild west environment they helped create, so no tears please.
What you described is "let's ok to rob rich people, since they have more money". This logic is BS. If you don't buy smaller company's KO, then apply this principal to all companies' product as well, don't talk about ethics, integrity and conscious while happily buying KO. No matter big or small, companies all need to make profit and survive.
Completely agree with these. People getting worked up about 3rd party stuff getting KO'd need to realise that the only reason that 3P's exist is because they're using someones elses (Hasbro/Takara) characters. It can't be "one rule for them and one rule for us." I've little sympathy for any of their designs getting KO'd, and i'm someone who buys a lot of 3P stuff.
so $110 usd for a ko utopia that might be oversized......i'd be in if combiner wars wasn't killing me already......
does this spell the beginning of the end for 3P companies? taking aside the morality argument, it's pure economics - when the toy design u painstakingly created is easily ripped off by another company, your incentive to create more good stuff rapidly diminishes. that's why IP laws were created in the first place.
Wasn't the battle tanker set KO'd? How about Fansproject stuff? Toyworld throttle bots? I don't understand the big huff and puff. TT/Hasbro masterpieces are KO'd, upsized and repainted. No one bats an eye. Everyone needs to calm down. If you don't like it don't buy it. Want it? Buy it.
Conversely, I feel genuine sympathy towards anyone who lets the legality of a thing dictate their own personal morality. It's wholly irrelevant.
I share your concern, if lightly. It's less that China doesn't respect IP law, but more like that's not how business works there, to some degree. Seems like it's about who has it and can sell it, not who thought it up, in western sense. Interesting article on npr about an example of this: The Hoverboard Mystery: Where Did The Holidays' Hot Product Come From? : NPR That swagway/skywalker thing that's all the rage now was originally a Kickstarter for a thing called a hovertrax. But before he could even get it to market it had been copied/redesigned and there are literally hundreds of little networked companies that make the parts. Pretty interesting article. Hope it doesn't happen to third party.
