Sabrblade wrote:That Bot wrote:As far as they're concerned, they showed us the prototype at CybertronCon, and now they're going to announce the final product. What Takara did in the meantime is irrelevant.
If the "they" = "Hasbro", then something's a bit off since the Breakdown prototype pic we saw in the slides at Cybertron Con was of the Takara version since it had Arms Micron Ports on it.
As Cybertron Con's presentation was a joint one with representatives from both sides of the pond, I think it's safe to consider that Hasbro's reveal as well. The only weird thing is that at Botcon, from what I gather, they went back and pretended there was
no Breakdown toy, rather than just saying "we can't give any new information right now."
THEORY: Maybe they have a Skyquake situation, where they developed a toy that was originally going to be Breakdown with a blue deco, but around the time the toy would see release, the show was going to debut their MECH upgraded Breakdown, so they changed plans for the first use of the toy mold to look like that. Since that would sort of provide major spoilers for the show, they declined comment. And then Takara does their own thing and solicits preorders for characters they won't see in the show for another six months, so the fandom finds out anyway. Go figure.
The problem is, if Hasbro just comes out and says "Hey, we've got this toy coming out soon, and that one, and another" all through the year, then they aren't left with anything new or special to show off at Toy Fair and SDCC, where they're competing for attention with other toymakers. They need that attention, so they save a lot of big stuff for these events.
AlexSpastic wrote:Japan hasn't contributed squat to the Transformer franchise. They stopped making and decent stories or video games so why are American markets left out of anything?
Well, the Asian exclusive figures are for
Hasbro's Asian markets. AKA, everywhere that's NOT Japan. Singapore, Taiwan, China, Korea, those places. They're getting the figures because apparently that's where the money lies right now. America isn't the best place to sell Transformers at the moment, it seems, so they're going to put the best stock where the money is. It sucks, but they're in the business of making money first and foremost.