The Energon Pub

I was recently sent an email by Hasbro Pulse.
They wanted a short review
on my new SG BLURR.
You all know the type.

I initially was just gonna give it a 4 outta 5 stars
(If u got one, u know why)
And move on.

But I stopped & thought about "why 4?"

2 simple reasons:
#1 I am sick to death of exclusives.
But the real reason
#2 Fantastic figures, sure!
But, you charge far too much
for something that is basically a repaint.
Stop.
You have already convinced us to shell out for the same thing
at least twice
(if not a dozen times in the case of Seekers & Side/Streak repaints),
but on top of that
you absolutely need to charge more?
Why?

It's a TOTAL bull$#!@ game.
I completely sick of it!
And I need these companies to stop!
Just stop charging so FRAKKIN much extra!
It's not fare!
It's not special.
And I can't stop buying my Plastic Crack
So be a caring drug dealer and cut us some slack!

It's not like the collector's are not going to buy!


PS. Hell, I'd love to stage some kind of group boycott on the whole overpriced exclusives thing... but then we would have to not buy them... and that... just ain't going to happen.

Dammit.

They aren't, it includes an exclusive comic (cover) which isn't free. Plus it isn't cover priced, it's marked with an RE which I believe stands for "retail exclusive" (as opposed to RI covers, "retail incentive"). While Hasbro doesn't usually mark up repainted figures, they can still mark up a comic which is pretty standard practice. So you're paying $23 for the figure and $7 for the comic (a $3 markup, less than most retailers ask looking around online). Not great if you don't care about the comic, but you are getting more than a figure. Certainly not as nice as getting free comics in the early Generations days, but those were later reprints, not current (or advance even) releases.

Emerje

Hooey.
I call hooey.

X3ROhour wrote:Hooey.
I call hooey.

So the answer is, exclusive repaints don't necessarily require higher price tags, but exclusive comics do.

X3ROhour wrote:Hooey.
I call hooey.

I don't see how, the only exclusives sold for more than retail on Pulse are the ones that come with extra stuff. Whether it's comics, weapons or blast effects anything over the base price is what Hasbro thinks the extras are worth.

Emerje

Hi, I am an economics teacher.

**dodges rotten tomato**

Hasbro has an incentive to produce regular retail figures at the regular pricepoint.
This is not an accident, Habro has calculated exactly how many Kingdom beast megatrons it needs to produce to optimise its profit. So that is the amount of regular figures it produces at the regular price.

Hasbro is under no obligation to produce the exclusive 25th anniversary T-Wrecks. and since T-Wrecks is not a show character, Hasbro has no reason to assume it will be a commercial success.
Hasbro does understand there are some people who are willing to pay for this relatively obscure character. but yeah, Hasbro already calculated it's optimal profits at the regular pricepoint, so it has no reason to take the hassle of actually producing a recolour. sticking with the original optimal production quantity, that would mean Hasbro would reduce the amount of Beast Megatrons to make place for T-wrecks and still stay at the optimum. which makes no sense, creating a separate productionline just because of some obscure reference? so at the same pricepoint Hasbro would not.

Now if people are willing to pay more, this changes the decision proces. At a higher pricepoint the profit is optimised at a different quantity. That extra profit may be enough to get a middle aged manager out of bed earlier to organise a separate productionline. to Hire an extra employee to do quality control on these exclusives.

But what about the consumers? Must they be forced to surrender higher and higher prices? No. If you don't want to pay the higher price, then don't buy the figure. In Hasbro's calculations they have already assumed many are unwilling to pay more for basically the same figure. Hasbro is fine with people only buying Beast Megatron, and skipping T-Wrecks. but for those willing to pay, it does provide them with some nice obscure reference.


In summary, You basically have a choice. Only the current amount of mainline figures, or the mainline plus some exclusives.


P.S. Also, we are spoiled consumers. We tend to forget that we get entire lines of non-show toys just because hasbro can. Technically Hasbro would be fine skipping Universe/Generations/war for cybertron and just sticking to Transformers Cyberverse.

You're forgetting something, exclusives are mostly profit for Hasbro. All the sculpting, mold tooling, and most of the QA is already done the first time around. They also tend to use cheaper plastic to really add to their profits. In the end Hasbro isn't even the one setting the price, exclusives are always priced by the stores selling them, all Hasbro cares about is unit prices.

Emerje

Emerje wrote:You're forgetting something, exclusives are mostly profit for Hasbro. All the sculpting, mold tooling, and most of the QA is already done the first time around. They also tend to use cheaper plastic to really add to their profits. In the end Hasbro isn't even the one setting the price, exclusives are always priced by the stores selling them, all Hasbro cares about is unit prices.

Emerje

Which makes this shattered glass blurr case even more interesting then, since Hasbro is also the store selling it.

Emerje wrote:Certainly not as nice as getting free comics in the early Generations days, but those were later reprints, not current (or advance even) releases.

Emerje

Even though the comics being packaged with T30 and CW deluxes were exclusive to U.S. releases (IIRC), I never considered them *free*. I figured a $15 deluxe back then would have only been $12 w/o the comic, which always frustrated me because I didn't care about the comics at all. But I guess it's better than trying to purchase CW figures now on the aftermarket...yeesh. I thought it was bad getting in on the tail end in 2016, I'd hate to try to start now.

If you really want to see some high priced shenanigans,
Take a look at the Seacons combiner from a while ago.

Seawing,
a limb piece,
retooled from engineering already in use,
Should cost $19.99.
Hasbro Pulse has it listed at
$36.99

No comic book.

X3ROhour wrote:If you really want to see some high priced shenanigans,
Take a look at the Seacons combiner from a while ago.

Seawing,
a limb piece,
retooled from engineering already in use,
Should cost $19.99.
Hasbro Pulse has it listed at
$36.99

No comic book.

TakaraTomy alone did all that for the Japanese market, no Hasbro involvement whatsoever. Thus it's classified as an Import, and you know how expensive they get.

X3ROhour wrote:If you really want to see some high priced shenanigans,
Take a look at the Seacons combiner from a while ago.

Seawing,
a limb piece,
retooled from engineering already in use,
Should cost $19.99.
Hasbro Pulse has it listed at
$36.99

No comic book.

Yeah, things just don't work that way, especially for Takara Selects.

First off the re-tool was much more extensive than anything that has been done within a retail price point and required new molds for at least 50% (most of them more) of the figure depending on which limb you are talking about. Not way that is being done at regular retail price. Second, they came with more accessories and an upgraded combiner hand over the retail releases, so more additional cost. Third, these were made in much smaller quantities than a regular release, so the production costs are spread out over fewer end products.

But neither of those were the main factor in the price, that was because the Seacons were Takara initiatives. Hasbro wasn't involved in the development. Hasbro Pulse in this case is just a retailer for Takara. Takara sets the price and Hasbro sets their markup unlike regular retail where they are designed by both companies specifically to fit the pricepoint.

X3ROhour wrote:If you really want to see some high priced shenanigans,
Take a look at the Seacons combiner from a while ago.

Seawing,
a limb piece,
retooled from engineering already in use,
Should cost $19.99.
Hasbro Pulse has it listed at
$36.99

No comic book.

Should cost 19.99, yes, if it wasn't an imported item. But here you are comparing imports to non imports. And the seacons were japanese imports, with the japanese box and everything. So it's a different pricing structure.
And once again it's not the figure being an exclusive repaint that makes it have a higher price (TWrecks is an exclusive repaint and that does nothing to the price), but it's the fact that it's an import.