Seibertron.com Energon Pub Forums

zodconvoy wrote:It sounds to me like Botcon is eating itself. What was a fan con became a company convention and is now a corporate presentation that we are graciously allowed to pay to attend.

Yep. Maybe they ought to save themselves some money and just post pics of new products online. Who needs Funpub? OH WAIT. The profit they make from charging $300+ for 5 toys is probably still worth it to Hasbro.

So they're essentially also saying that hard-working artists shouldn't be paid for their work if it contains images of Hasbro property. Seems pretty BS to me. Why don't they compromise and require artists who wish to sell art purchase a one-time license for say $10 and they are permitted to sell their work for the duration of the 'Con. Hasbro gets their cut, everyone's (generally) happy. Y'know, instead of being dicks and outright banning it.

The Q&A is going to be hilarious this year.

guys/girls this is a toy company.....its "targeted" audience are children. it isn't very surprising they don't worry about their adult consumers. as long as kids go to stores and say mommy I want a transformer hasbro is happy. when they become unhappy they arnt going to worry about changeing things they are just going to move on........so yeah no more transformers.....

njb902 wrote:guys/girls this is a toy company.....its "targeted" audience are children. it isn't very surprising they don't worry about their adult consumers. as long as kids go to stores and say mommy I want a transformer hasbro is happy. when they become unhappy they arnt going to worry about changeing things they are just going to move on........so yeah no more transformers.....

The problem with this strategy (as I pointed out above) is it's rapidly becoming difficult to produce decent toys that can be sold inexpensivey, thus why Hasbro is trying to get out of the toy business....

Just watch, the next thing to fall victim will be the cosplay!

njb902 wrote:guys/girls this is a toy company.....its "targeted" audience are children. it isn't very surprising they don't worry about their adult consumers. as long as kids go to stores and say mommy I want a transformer hasbro is happy. when they become unhappy they arnt going to worry about changeing things they are just going to move on........so yeah no more transformers.....

A counter intuitive argument seeing as we are talking about a convention that no children can register for.

Anyone under the age of what? 18? has to be accompanied by an adult. A half Generation One themed boxed set.... for kids who weren't even alive for G1?

I'm more than a bit fed up with people making excuses for corporations taking foolish measures to protect their intellectual property against imagined threats. I'm a Transformers fan, not a Hasbro apologist.

If Hasbro wants fan loyalty they have to continue to earn it, especially since their entire business model rests heavily on exploiting parents' nostalgia for their own childhoods....

GetRightRobot wrote:

njb902 wrote:guys/girls this is a toy company.....its "targeted" audience are children. it isn't very surprising they don't worry about their adult consumers. as long as kids go to stores and say mommy I want a transformer hasbro is happy. when they become unhappy they arnt going to worry about changeing things they are just going to move on........so yeah no more transformers.....

A counter intuitive argument seeing as we are talking about a convention that no children can register for.

Anyone under the age of what? 18? has to be accompanied by an adult. A half Generation One themed boxed set.... for kids who weren't even alive for G1?

but hasbro didn't start botcon they juat co-opted it. they saw a way to make a quick buck and ran with it. also I apologize for getting off topic, I wasn't commenting on botcon so much as on hasbro.

GetRightRobot wrote:

njb902 wrote:guys/girls this is a toy company.....its "targeted" audience are children. it isn't very surprising they don't worry about their adult consumers. as long as kids go to stores and say mommy I want a transformer hasbro is happy. when they become unhappy they arnt going to worry about changeing things they are just going to move on........so yeah no more transformers.....

A counter intuitive argument seeing as we are talking about a convention that no children can register for.

Anyone under the age of what? 18? has to be accompanied by an adult. A half Generation One themed boxed set.... for kids who weren't even alive for G1?

This is truly a fan-thing indeed. This is arguably the ONLY place where our opinion truly counts.

RhA wrote:

GetRightRobot wrote:

njb902 wrote:guys/girls this is a toy company.....its "targeted" audience are children. it isn't very surprising they don't worry about their adult consumers. as long as kids go to stores and say mommy I want a transformer hasbro is happy. when they become unhappy they arnt going to worry about changeing things they are just going to move on........so yeah no more transformers.....

A counter intuitive argument seeing as we are talking about a convention that no children can register for.

Anyone under the age of what? 18? has to be accompanied by an adult. A half Generation One themed boxed set.... for kids who weren't even alive for G1?

This is truly a fan-thing indeed. This is arguably the ONLY place where our opinion truly counts.

....counted.

GetRightRobot wrote:

RhA wrote:

GetRightRobot wrote:

njb902 wrote:guys/girls this is a toy company.....its "targeted" audience are children. it isn't very surprising they don't worry about their adult consumers. as long as kids go to stores and say mommy I want a transformer hasbro is happy. when they become unhappy they arnt going to worry about changeing things they are just going to move on........so yeah no more transformers.....

A counter intuitive argument seeing as we are talking about a convention that no children can register for.

Anyone under the age of what? 18? has to be accompanied by an adult. A half Generation One themed boxed set.... for kids who weren't even alive for G1?

This is truly a fan-thing indeed. This is arguably the ONLY place where our opinion truly counts.

....counted.

The times they area changing.

RhA wrote:

GetRightRobot wrote:

njb902 wrote:guys/girls this is a toy company.....its "targeted" audience are children. it isn't very surprising they don't worry about their adult consumers. as long as kids go to stores and say mommy I want a transformer hasbro is happy. when they become unhappy they arnt going to worry about changeing things they are just going to move on........so yeah no more transformers.....

A counter intuitive argument seeing as we are talking about a convention that no children can register for.

Anyone under the age of what? 18? has to be accompanied by an adult. A half Generation One themed boxed set.... for kids who weren't even alive for G1?

This is truly a fan-thing indeed. This is arguably the ONLY place where our opinion truly counts.

Yeah, well it looks as though even our voice won't count there for much longer.

I'd sggest that any artsits out there who like to make money could take something they own the rights to, be it a small-press comic, prints of your own characters, or, if 2nd hand toys are okay, a bunch of cyberverse guys or something, and offer Free Sketches with the purchase of something Hasbro hasn't banned. Or, y'know, try to sell sketches of stuff they're not claiming ownership of. Original GoBots designs or something.

craggy wrote:I'd sggest that any artsits out there who like to make money could take something they own the rights to, be it a small-press comic, prints of your own characters, or, if 2nd hand toys are okay, a bunch of cyberverse guys or something, and offer Free Sketches with the purchase of something Hasbro hasn't banned. Or, y'know, try to sell sketches of stuff they're not claiming ownership of. Original GoBots designs or something.

..oooorrrrrrr, save a bunch of money by not paying their ridiculous admission costs and go to a FAN convention like TFCon, DairyCon, TFExpo, Auto Assembly, Roll out Roll Call. Instead of paying to get into a Corporate Function.

Okay, Hasbro has a right--I guess--to protect their intellectual property. I work in academia. I write papers. People use my ideas in my papers to make their own papers. I don't get money, but in my field, I get credited--they must cite me as their source. So I GET IP and wanting to be credited, even though in my case it has never fattened my wallet.

Here's the dumb thing, though: I can see their beef against direct competition: toys. I can't see their beef against fan art or fan crafts, because they're actually not LOSING any money. If they're not selling a competitive product, they are losing NOTHING.

Botcon is the big loser here, in both meanings of the word. I think they are stuck between a rock and a hard place, and honestly, I'm wondering if it's even worth it to go this year, and if I do go, I'm pretty sure I will NOT be attending future ones: the only reason I'd go is I've already sunk money into airfare, etc that's nonrefundable.

But to me, the dickest of dick moves, honestly, is that this is just breaking NOW. The fact that they're sending these letters out now to me is an admission that they're changing policy--in a sense, they are VIOLATING THE CONTRACT that they have made AA's sign, and pay for. If they'd announced all of this BEFORE registration, I assure you, my decision to attend or not would have been a NON decision, and I would have kept my money.

In short, breaking this with less than 30 days to go till Con time? When people have no choice to cancel their registrations? WRONG ANSWER.

HK, srsly.

GetRightRobot wrote:

craggy wrote:I'd sggest that any artsits out there who like to make money could take something they own the rights to, be it a small-press comic, prints of your own characters, or, if 2nd hand toys are okay, a bunch of cyberverse guys or something, and offer Free Sketches with the purchase of something Hasbro hasn't banned. Or, y'know, try to sell sketches of stuff they're not claiming ownership of. Original GoBots designs or something.

..oooorrrrrrr, save a bunch of money by not paying their ridiculous admission costs and go to a FAN convention like TFCon, DairyCon, TFExpo, Auto Assembly, Roll out Roll Call. Instead of paying to get into a Corporate Function.

So in short, you're calling a boycot on BotCon 2012?

JelZe GoldRabbit wrote:

GetRightRobot wrote:

craggy wrote:I'd sggest that any artsits out there who like to make money could take something they own the rights to, be it a small-press comic, prints of your own characters, or, if 2nd hand toys are okay, a bunch of cyberverse guys or something, and offer Free Sketches with the purchase of something Hasbro hasn't banned. Or, y'know, try to sell sketches of stuff they're not claiming ownership of. Original GoBots designs or something.

..oooorrrrrrr, save a bunch of money by not paying their ridiculous admission costs and go to a FAN convention like TFCon, DairyCon, TFExpo, Auto Assembly, Roll out Roll Call. Instead of paying to get into a Corporate Function.

So in short, you're calling a boycot on BotCon 2012?

All I'm saying is there are other gatherings of fans, that embrace the fandom as a whole, not just the parts that increase sales for Hasbro (HAS).

Personally, it seems shady that they've made this announcement AFTER I've payed for my non-refundable airfare. It's a personal decision.

GetRightRobot wrote:
Personally, it seems shady that they've made this announcement AFTER I've payed for my non-refundable airfare. It's a personal decision.

This. Exactly. This is the 'eff you, fans' that really gets to me.

HK, still crabby

hellkitty wrote:Here's the dumb thing, though: I can see their beef against direct competition: toys. I can't see their beef against fan art or fan crafts, because they're actually not LOSING any money. If they're not selling a competitive product, they are losing NOTHING.

I've got a feeling the likes of Aaron Archer and his fellow designers, the guys that often interact with the fans at these conventions, are sitting in their offices being held hostage by Hasbro Lawyers who are preparing a massive fight against 3rd party/KO companies and they need to cover ALL their bases before they can launch their assault.

They know what they're doing sucks, and will piss off a lot of fans, but they probably see it as the only thing they can do to protect their IP as a whole.

It'd be nice if they could give more clarification as to the why this is happening, but again, most likely a legal issue and they can't disclose.

I guess it's only inevitable that they'll be targeting kitbashers soon.

hellkitty wrote:

GetRightRobot wrote:
Personally, it seems shady that they've made this announcement AFTER I've payed for my non-refundable airfare. It's a personal decision.

This. Exactly. This is the 'eff you, fans' that really gets to me.

HK, still crabby

I'm going to BOO the S**T outa these people at the panels. Wanna join in?

hellkitty wrote:Here's the dumb thing, though: I can see their beef against direct competition: toys. I can't see their beef against fan art or fan crafts, because they're actually not LOSING any money. If they're not selling a competitive product, they are losing NOTHING.

allow me to play "unicron's lawyer" for a second...
But I'm pretty sure Hasbro can in some way claim to be losing money off Joe Bloggs drawing a nice picture of Starscream and selling it for $5. Hasbro sell a license to IDW to create comic books, which are essentially paper with pictures of transformers on them. I'd suspect, although haven't actually seen any lately, that IDW or a 3rd party have a license to create art prints and posters and stuff featuring the art from those comics, and I'm fairly certain there must be some company somewhere getting paid to produce posters featuring the movie renders of Prime and Bumblebee, that are clogging up space in stores across the land as we speak.

This sort of corporate BS isn't new. The Mouse recently hit an old man with a lawsuit because he was selling Ghost Rider prints. The man was Gary Friedrich who cannot be legally named as the creator of Ghost Rider, because Herr Disney got a court order to stop such identification being made. That's in an industry that publishes the names of the creators of the work (which is done on a work for hire contract, same as IDW's comics, or Takara's toy engineering) on the covers of the products. You think Hasbro, who very rarely identify or acknowledge their designers, are going to go any easier on people?

=P

GetRightRobot wrote:

I'm going to BOO the S**T outa these people at the panels. Wanna join in?

Dude, I AM SO THERE with you on that sentiment. I am SO exhausted at this point with this continuing series of setbacks as we get closer and closer to Botcon weekend. My biggest complaint that I mentioned weeks ago in another thread (Re: 3rd Party Ban) is why for the love of god are they waiting until THIS close to the actual function to implement these stupid-ass new rules AFTER everyone has pre-paid and gotten their financial commitments paid out and all types of other travel "ducks in a row". You don't advertise a function with the plan of serving "A" and then on the actual date in question change the plan to then serve "B". After I said that before in the other thread, someone on here disagreed and said they thought Hasbro had a right to do whatever they wanted on whatever time scale they chose, and thats fine if you wanna think that. But anyone that knows anything about taking care of your customer base can tell you that Hasbro is making a huge mistake this year with how they are choosing to implement all of these new protocols this late in the game. I've gotten used to Botcon being a certain way and if it's not going to be that way anymore then I'm probobly not going anymore.
I'm already committed to going this year and have made all these plans but I gotta be honest, it's looking like things are building up to be a big 'ol suck fest with plenty of SUCK. With gas going up at the rate that it is, I don't wanna drive all the way from Tallahassee to Dallas and back again just to have to sit through all of this "panel drama" and reduced market place and item availability. I really feel bad for the people spending more money than me on hotels and airfare. This whole situation seems to be getting out of hand at the last minute. At this point I'm mainly going to meet the people that will be there and for the gathering in general, it'll be nice to put a name and face togetheir for alot of the community members here.

I'm gonna wait and see how the site moderators and heiarchy of Seibertron decide to handle this as a group. I have a feeling that I'm not the only one who is feeling perturbed at this point.

Way to go Hasblow....way to go.

Torgon02 wrote:

JelZe GoldRabbit wrote:

Dorkimus wrote:Actually some game companies tried to stop people from re-selling their games. Some suggested making the games kind of a console bound. Meaning that once you put the game inside your console it is registered to that particular console only and basically you couldn't sell it forward. But I think that this didn't quite work. Don't remember all the details, but I guess it was against some laws and such.

Really? Never heard of that story.

My guess is that is to prevent software piracy, as I can imagine it's pretty easy to copy games onto a blank cartridge or disk if you have the right equipment. With us in the Netherlands we're pretty strict on software sales: exchange within 24 hours, or if it has a one-use activation code, no exchange at all.

I actually have a couple of DS games like that. To activate the games online functionality it registered the game/console combination so I can never use that cartridge online in different console or with a different user account.

EA is leading the way for a total ban on all used game sales with the idea that every time someone buys a used game they lose a new copy sale
And I think it's Warner Bro's who is trying to do the same with movies

So what happens when your console shits out and you have to buy a new one? Your games no longer work? That seems like a bunch of BS...

Kibble wrote:

Torgon02 wrote:

JelZe GoldRabbit wrote:

Dorkimus wrote:Actually some game companies tried to stop people from re-selling their games. Some suggested making the games kind of a console bound. Meaning that once you put the game inside your console it is registered to that particular console only and basically you couldn't sell it forward. But I think that this didn't quite work. Don't remember all the details, but I guess it was against some laws and such.

Really? Never heard of that story.

My guess is that is to prevent software piracy, as I can imagine it's pretty easy to copy games onto a blank cartridge or disk if you have the right equipment. With us in the Netherlands we're pretty strict on software sales: exchange within 24 hours, or if it has a one-use activation code, no exchange at all.

I actually have a couple of DS games like that. To activate the games online functionality it registered the game/console combination so I can never use that cartridge online in different console or with a different user account.

EA is leading the way for a total ban on all used game sales with the idea that every time someone buys a used game they lose a new copy sale
And I think it's Warner Bro's who is trying to do the same with movies

So what happens when your console shits out and you have to buy a new one? Your games no longer work? That seems like a bunch of BS...

Only the online functions, like Net Play. But that's beside the point of this thread.