I get the feel that if this thing had come out 20 years ago or so, people would be more interested in something like this. Maybe not specifically an "Optimus Prime wearing mutilated Starscream parts", but a good-looking display piece in general. Back then, the pre-BW era, we didn't have all the nice looking things we have now. There were no collector-oriented lines. No Masterpieces, no Alternators, no Human Alliance figures, nothing prettier than a Japanese G1 leader figure or G2's Laser Optimus Prime toy, which were arguably the best-looking things back then.
Nowadays, we have all these nice collector-aimed figures that serve as both fully functional toys with playability and as good-looking display pieces. It just shows how
spoiled fortunate we are as a fandom to have all these nice things at this time, when other lines aren't always so lucky and sometimes only get good-looking display pieces in instances such as the release of this Hot Toys statue.
Remember in the 2000s when all of the following (and more) were released?
There was more of a market for these kinds of things back then since the idea of Transformers toys for collectors was still a fairly new and fairly unexplored concept. Hot Toys is just carrying on with the same kind of agenda as the folks who made all of the above. If there seriously isn't enough of a market for an item like this in this day and age for Hot Toys to make a decent profit off of, then I guess the only thing to be said is that it came out at the wrong time. But, the fact that it even is getting made shows that someone still believes there's a market for this thing, however small and/or unspoken it might be.
having fullmetalghost on my bedstand, waiting on fullmetalghost captain form and that awesome atlas figure as well, makes me think that the 300-400 dollar figure segment is hard at work to get u hooked.. Sorry hottoys transformers, ur too late! I got my fix!
