Bandai makes "more premium feel" products than Hasbro.
I guess Bandai is avoiding that their P-Bandai releases gets KO'ed.
And I guess being a Japanese Brand, they as a company take a very high pride of themselves.
That's why they are very hard on KO makers.

Although at one point KO company like Dragon Momoko slaps Bandai's face by adding improvements to their PG Strike Gundam hence, effects parts and much articulated fingers, etc.

Hasbro I think the reason why they are lenient because they see 3Ps and KOs as "sources of ideas" so that they will have an easier time designing their toys.

I have this notion that MP-36 will not be made without the release of let's say Apollyon.
I felt they borrowed some pages from Apollyon.

And heck remember when Wei Jiang's MO-1 Commander was successful?
Didn't Has-Tak reversed engineered WJ's design to their own use?
Hence the Tak-Tom Legends Leader Class Evasion Prime

 

This is a blanket statement. There are 1:1 KOs of Masterpiece Transformers.

And the rest of your analogy is quite flawed. Sam Smith was sued because he sounded like Tom Petty.

Lastly, Has/Tak has issued C and D's for several KOs, including Grimlock's head, some of the Seekers, and Faith Leader.

As it stands, Has/Tak is quite aware of 3P (and to an extent, KO) according to them, but they "don't like to talk about it because then they'll have to take action."

Many have theorized shut downs and C and D's can occur, but the payout isn't worth it.

 

Yeah sure.
Go tell that to people with dx valkiryes joints disintegrating or becoming super loose in zero time, or to people with SOCs with rubber parts melting or parts breaking (i.e. last godmars reissue).
Also, if they could learn a trasformation trick or two from takara it would be a good thing, since partsforming and parts swapping in the 31st millennium is laughable.

 

This is actually one of the missions in the new Modern Warfare. You and Captain Price drop down through ceiling in a Chinese KO figure factory and start blasting fools left and right.

They're hard up for viable threats in this one...

 

All i can say about this news story is I'm totally glad. So that way it don't end up here on our shores.

 

I feel for anyone that's bought anything billed as premium with severe design issues. I myself have had numerous "premium" figures disintegrate or fall apart on me which would include Bandai figures. The polycaps in my PG RX-78-2 are dying a horrible death, for example. The poor thing looks like it belongs in a leper colony if the wind shifts too hard. As a result, I'm not going to say Bandai is some kind of toy Jesus. They're not. They make their share of mistakes - hence why I said you KINDA get what you're paying for. You're still rolling the dice on almost every high end figure. Hell, even Hot Toys and their ilk can suffer from stitching defects and occasional internal skeleton failures.

However, Bandai doesn't appear to have the same level of production issues as HasTak, and that's by specific design. Hastak has more issues because they make more things for more people. They need to do it much cheaper. It's going to happen. The super mass production nature of the products is going to result in greater levels of defects. Various misassembly items or flopped paint apps, chips, scratches, stuff like that - it's part of the deal when you're collecting these things.

However, some of the stuff that happens is pretty egregious, such as POTP Trypticon's infamous self destructing hips, or the misassembled legs in the Combiner Wars Onslaught mold that, IIRC carried over two at least two iterations of the mold before it got fixed. These toys are supposed to be ready to go, knock about kid-friendly figures. Things like Trypticon /really/ shouldn't happen. So for every SoC figure that pisses off a high end collector, there's probably 2-3 kids and their parents trying to figure out why their figure just self destructed or can't tab together or the guns don't fit.

If you want to talk about "31st millennium engineering", partsforming is a design choice. To paraphrase, whether partsforming is a failure is, like, your opinion man. People want different things from their figures. Bandai wants a solid look and is willing to forego transformation for aesthetic. It's about the same concept as choosing to go with molded switchable hands as opposed to articulated fingers.

Could they make their stuff more "transformable"? Sure. But a quick look at the MP Beast Wars guys shows you what happens when you start trying to cram transformation on figures that can't be engineered to look good in both modes. Both Dinobot and Blackarachnia are taking some flak for the beast modes and their wonkily placed kibble. If you wanted a sleek spider mode, it's this or partsforming. Some people like me are OK with how she looks, but some people hate it and could possibly have been okay with partsforming to make everything look slick.




Ultimately, it still has little to do with what I was talking about, which is that Bandai frankly has a little more skin in the game when it comes to KOs and 3P than HasTak, who is much bigger and churns out way more product to care as much about KOs. Given how absolutely rabid some of the fanbase is about the horror of KOs thanks to successful HasTak marketing, I think they have a little less to worry about than Bandai whose prices are a little more prohibitive and therefore forces them to do whatever they can to secure their market share lest they lose it to KOs and die a death of a thousand paper cuts.

 

I think you don't see the cease and desist orders from from Hasbro because a lot of the folks in the know are fans. The Unicron/Zeta Star thing is the closest I've seen Hasbro appear to get legitimately angry enough to move on.

The take away from this incident is that if Hasbro wanted to, they could shut it all down. Lots of folks have said that it would be outright impossible to shut down the KO's and Third Parties. This flies in the face of that. Hasbro could, they simply don't and probably won't as long as they don't see third parties or KO's as active competition.

 

I don’t think this means ko or 3P can easily be shutdown at all. There are still plenty of ko replicas and 3P accessories for Bandai products to go around.

 

No one said easily. Just that it can be shut down. And if Hasbro wanted they could mortally wound a lot of the 3rd party scene by going after distributors.

 

Ok, you didn’t say “easily” but what you said was this example shows that they could “shut it all down” and I’m just pointing out that it is not all shut down even though Bandai definitely seems to want to do just that.

 

I will buy KO's of figures they don't make, like some Peppa characters that appeared in the show, but never as toys you can get from china ebay sellers.

Things I HATE, ebay sellers claiming you are buying something without naming a brand so "nendoroid" but not saying "good smile company" or whoever it is that makes it. Then puts a picture of the LEGIT one. And only a toy collector would actually know that the price is too low for a real one. They always have poor feedback and no one is going to send it back to China, it will cost more than half the $30 they paid for it.