Hasbro Reports Year End Earnings in Q4 Conference Call

It's sort of sad that Transformers is doing badly compared to a pretty poor performance they had on Age of Extinction.

But it's like I often speculate - I just don't think RID is capturing people hearts as much as it might have.

If only it was possible to crunch the numbers to see if the over abundance of stuff aimed at say 7 year olds is a good thing or a bad thing.

I got the impression that they are still under-selling Rescue Bots compared to it's potential revenue so the younger end should be making more money.

I think if I had to guess (an it is just a guess) I would say they have lost some of the top end via dumbing down and the focus of the children who might be getting say 1 step changer or 3 step changers might actually be a lot smaller segment than you might think it should be if the younger kids gravitate to the Rescue Bots and the older kids don't want to be patronised by 3 step changers.

I expect if they made the 3 step slightly better toys the issues with them might be a bit less of a problem - but my personal opinion or thought is that perhaps those who buy a 3 step don't go out and buy a lot more of them - where as maybe they might buy more warriors.

But the problem with the entire RID line is it isn't sold like Transformers it's sold like Generic Action Figure brand number 200.

What I mean by that is that Transformers used to have a partial focus on new characters and variety and then a large chunk on "key characters"

Now it may as well be a Kenner Batman toyline with the majority being only random repaints of the same thing over and over (even if the toy is another character sometimes as with Combiner Wars or Minicons) but the main chunk is endless Optimus and Bumblebee.

Even when ROTF & DOTM when crzy bonkers for Bumblebee they did still make others too - RID-15/16 has a bit of a lack there though in my opinion at least.

Hopefully they can raise their game a bit once Hasbro's Star Wars mania dies down a bit.

RAR wrote:It's sort of sad that Transformers is doing badly compared to a pretty poor performance they had on Age of Extinction.

But it's like I often speculate - I just don't think RID is capturing people hearts as much as it might have.

RID is doing better than Prime did. Hasbro has gotten great sales on a non movie year, better than other years where there was only prime and generations.

william-james88 wrote:

RAR wrote:It's sort of sad that Transformers is doing badly compared to a pretty poor performance they had on Age of Extinction.

But it's like I often speculate - I just don't think RID is capturing people hearts as much as it might have.

RID is doing better than Prime did. Hasbro has gotten great sales on a non movie year, better than other years where there was only prime and generations.

I remember discussing this on another site back when Hasbro had their investor day. AoE didn't have particularly poor performance:

(Sorry for the compression. You can view the full-size here: http://news.tfw2005.com/2015/11/16/tfw2 ... 015-305388)

As you can see, AoE didn't make RotF money, but its earnings were in line with the other two films. You may be thinking about box office (which, like most sequels, did decrease) but box office and toy sales aren't as closely aligned as we might think. I like this chart because it shows how movie and non-movie years clearly have different baselines.

Also, to echo Will, note how well 2015 looked, considering that that's only the first 9 months (i.e. without Christmas).

Transformers didn't do as well last year? I thought they did great with Combiner Wars - I know I bought a lot more figures in 2015 than I normally get - and it was all CW, man....

Shockwave7 wrote:Transformers didn't do as well last year? I thought they did great with Combiner Wars - I know I bought a lot more figures in 2015 than I normally get - and it was all CW, man....

They did do great. They just didnt do as well as when there were movie toys, which is anticipated.