yami4ct wrote:Japan and the US have very different Action Figure markets. Where Japan's market is nearly completely made-up of collectors willing to spend more to get nicer looking toys. The US market is made of children and parents who don't care about the minor details, they only care that the price is low. Paint, if you can believe it, is very expensive. Especially when you're talking about the hundreds of thousands of units hasbro is producing. Adding a few small paint apps means adding quite a bit of cost to the entire run. Hasbro could either do two things there. They can either raise the price, which they will not do as it is established the main market for TFs in the US is price sensitive children and parents, or take what might be a fairly significant profit hit. It's likely the paint they give us now is in the sweet spot of enough to make the toys look alright, but still give them a nice profit. As for why they can't do small run collator oriented repaint lines, it's likely the market for that is too small to justify a new production run.
Thanks, that really helped. For ourselves in Singapore, we're so pampered with such a huge influx of Takara stuff, and have so many toy collectors to sustain the market, that I hardly remember sometimes that these toys were meant for KIDS. It's also a surprise sometimes when I see toys which are Lawson's exclusives, Target's exclusives etc, and how people can't find this or that toy, because almost ALL of it gets here and it's not a big deal.
On the other hand, maybe some consolation may be found in the fact that the Hasbro toys are up to half as cheap where you are. By the time they get to us, it's ridiculous. A deluxe costs USD$23, a Voyager USD$44, and Leader USD$88.
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