Mkall wrote:craggy wrote:You've a lot of good points. However, these 6 figures are not gang-molded, so it'd be quite possible for them to sell the more niche figures under a made to order scheme, and if they're only shipping one a month, then I have to imagine that would in theory give them an extra month to supply info on how many of the 2nd figure need to be made, and so on. But they'd rather be all secretive about which one is being released when, in what I expect is a move to make people pay over the odds for the one or two figures they want from this set. Of course, it's nice that the shipping schedule is a secret, because that way anyone without the internet will not know what the first figure is 2 minutes after the first person receives theirs.
You're right too, I think the real reason the Club is going this route is they (and we as fans) have grown tired of mis-estimating the number of figs that they should sell. Punch/Counterpunch sold out in minutes the first time 'round, and the their Runamuck (or was it Runabout?) lasted 24 hours. Conversely their Airazor and Astrotrain took years to sell out.
Whether or not we like the method of distribution, from a business standpoint it's pretty good. They move a lot of product without worrying about over/understocking.
yeah, but lets say of the 6 figures, there's 5,000 people who want them all. (btw, a heads up here, I'm just going to pick up some relatively easily scalable numbers here, and have ABSOLUTELY NO IDEA how much any of this stuff sells) now, obviously those 5,000 will buy the lot. Now, there might be another 5,000 people who want half of them. Lets pretend that the fates are kind and the planets align and that that breaks down to 2,5000 people who want a particular 3 and another 2,5000 who want the other 3 and that those people all club together to buy the sets in pairs and half them. that's 10,000 sales.
now, there's a very real chance that there'll be a few people who might not want all of the figures, but will pay the money for all of them for the ones they want, and might later recoup some of the costs via selling their unwanted figures on ebay. let's say that's another 5,000, just to keep things nice and round. 15,000 sales.
now, lets say there are 20,000 of us out there who want one figure in particular. there might be another 10,000 who don't want that figure, but want one of the other ones. there might be another 5,000 who want another one, and so on, and so on.
Now, looking through this thread, yes, there are some names being repeated often and by most people as ones we'd want. There certainly seems to be a heirarchy of popularity we could establish. One could, if say perhaps, we owned the website that these figures were being offered through, run a poll to see which are more popular. We could, if we were running some kind of club, and only selling to members, and as such had the email addresses of these members, send out an email asking how many of each particular figure each member would purchase. Granted, sometimes these numbers will change, but it would give a rough estimate.
For the people who buy the whole set, there should be a discount, I'd be happy with that, but I think that the individual toys being sold on their own, even if they required a club membership to purchase them, would encourage a lot of people to buy who might not otherwise. I might not like paying $200 for Depth Charge and Scourge, but I'd be far more likely to do that than pay $600 for all of them and have to wait on each coming out in order to find someone to sell the unwanted ones to.
There will be people who'll just buy these because they're there, but for many of us, considering the current economic climate, I think they'd get more overall sales if they allowed the purchase of individual figures, and then made them to order. Let members buy 5 Ultra Mammoths if they want, or a dozen Slipstreams. Looking at this, I'm not seeing the majority of people saying "ah screw it, I only want one but I got thousands of dollars and time to spare" I see people saying "well, I want x but I don't care about the rest". I imagine it's similar on other fan sites, and really, the internet fan site are the target market for these, unlike a mass retail wave where the power of kids and parents can theoretically screw up any assumptions we make about case assortments and the like.
assembling a Neo-G1/TF:TM cast. Please PM if you have (or know of) the following at a reasonable price: Classics or Henkei Astrotrain, Sunstreaker, Sideswipe, or 3rd Party iGear Ratchet and Ironhide.
Also looking for Universe Repugnus and Overbite, Frostbite and Longhorn and any Webdiver toys.