I'd like to stress five points:
1) Generations Combiner Wars is not accompanied by a mass released multimedia. It has comics, but at least in America Comics are not "cool" or "proper" reading material, and good luck finding parents who support their children reading comic books. If Generations had a mass market video game for all ages or an animated series it would see better distribution in theory, but not guaranteed because of all the other points.
2) Stores get burned on shelf warmers, and Hasbro is entirely responsible for creating this problem with the way it distributes product. Going back to RotF, Skids and Mudflap were sitting on shelves for over a year. DotM starts releasing toys and the first two on the market are, wait for it... Skids and Mudflap, the two most controversial characters of the last movie that didn't even appear in the new one and should have received updates.
AoE as previously mentioned began with repaints of DotM toys. WTH?
Fast forward to Combiner Wars. First, there is point one. Then there is the distribution. Somebody didn't want all air vehicles in wave one so Dragstrip was released and misrepresented as part of Superion on the packaging. But that wasn't the worst sin. They released the Optimus Prime version of the truck mold instead of Motormaster first. A far better strategy for what Hasbro wanted to accomplish on the shelves would have been to split the first waive equally between Superion and Menasor AND properly represent the gestalts on the packaging in waive one. Silverbolt and Motormaster as the voyagers come first accompanied by a jet, helicopter, sports car and SUV. Optimus heads wave two as the new voyager, accompanied by two jets, a Formula One race car and another sports car. Of course after that Defensor can be released as wave three and the Autobot combiner as wave four because stores will have variety early and hopefully room on the shelves from successful sales.
It is up to the stores to ensure they don't rush to refill the shelves with the same items they sold in wave one before wave two is released, which means it's up to Hasbro to educate the retailers on what is coming and when it will be there, and suggest how to stock up in a way that does not create shelf warmers.
3) Confusion due to so many options. Legions, Warrior, One-step, Three-step- and that's just RID. I'd argue Legions are no longer necessary as One-Step changers are the tiny figures now, so why not just get a Warrior that comes with a weapon for kids who can transform a figure? RID has too many options, then there is Rescue Bots, and for the collectors and comic readers we have Generations. The latter two lines are simple to understand, but the show line, and the movie lines are stuffed with too many options. Stores don't know what to do and where the toys should be placed. They have Rescue Bots in the tots isle where they belong. That's where the Three-step changers should be too, since that's the target market. One-step changers should either be made larger for the tots or replace legions as the small option. I've just made sense of something retailers should understand but don't. And I'm not in their business.
4) End of year waves are not the time to release new figures. Even wave four has a high chance of not making the shelves for Chrismas because of previous waves still taking up space and an abundance of shelf warmers like too many Bumblebees. Hasbro needs hard release dates for each quarter, and no wave five, period. Wave one in January, wave two in April, wave three in July and wave four in October. But wave four stores will have restocked on previous waves and smart chains will have redistributed items in advance of a new wave release to ensure all stores have the new product instead of old product nobody wants anymore because they already mostly have it.
5) I'm not sure the other points even matter anymore because the price has gone up so high parents aren't going to support Combiner Wars and maybe the stores see that. Back when deluxe class toys were $10 the shelves were stocked with just about every toy Hasbro made. And yes, end of year waves that did not show up before New Years hit shelves to start the year after the clearance sales cleaned out the old stock. And we had beginning of the year price wars to further help clear up the rest of the previous year's stock while wave one of the new year was rolling in. I remember for a few years Target and Walmart had price wars to end the old year and start the new year and that's when I loaded up on Universe 2.0 and later early Generations. Oh how I miss $8 deluxe sale prices. But I was still purchasing during the year because the prices made sense. I just added additional characters because of the sales, and that's supposed to be the point of the sale, right?
This year I got Superion online and on sale through HTS for around $80. That's four deluxes at $15 and one voyager at $20. Yes, that makes no sense when you think about it, and I am approximating, but it comes to about $80 before tax. Maybe Hasbro would have been smarter to sell gift packages of combiners for $80 to go along with individual limb releases at $15 and torsos at $25? Get the gift set at a lesser price, and then pick up individual toys to augment but those will cost more. Good marketing by Hasbro well in advance would allow parents to budget and kids to know what to ask for. And yet, I have a hard time justifying paying more than $15 for a deluxe. Certainly more than $25 for a voyager is too much, that's getting into the currently defunct ultra class price range. $45 for a leader:
If parents won't pay the current prices, and stores are making things worse by jacking them up, it's no wonder shelves were first filled with unwanted figures, finally emptied during holiday sales, and now bare for fear of not selling again. Stores won't stock what they can't move, even if they are partly to blame for the problem. But it all falls on Hasbro to get everything right to begin with, and clearly Hasbro is not doing that.
How in the hell can this be? I can't even fathom how many others store may have this inexcusable situation.
