Tigermegatron wrote:AS FAR AS IP THEFT is concerned. Hasbro doesn't own the exclusive rights to robots that change into animals,weapons or vechicles.
IP theft & suing can only go so far. EXAMPLES: We never saw any TV set companies suing each other over IP theft. we never saw any VCR/DVD set companies suing each other over IP theft. how about those computers,printers,cars,phones,we never saw them sue each other over IP Theft. how about those VHS tapes,DVD/CD disk,they didn't belong to one company,their were no law suits from other companies using them. how about car tires,their were no law suits about companies stealing the rubber round tire formula. how about soft drinks,we didn't see anyone sue over using that black color or different colors for each flavor & the list goes on into infinity.
No, we see lawsuits over computers and tech all the time. Apple and Android phone makers like HTC and Samsung are locked in huge battles right now. Sony created their Betamax video tape standard and went to war with JVC who created the VHS video tape standard. Every use of DVD technology sold has a license fee paid to a consortium that created it - Sony, Philips, Toshiba, and Panasonic - and every CD license fee goes to the first half of that consortium, anybody who violates those patent rights is sued. Tire treads are patented designs as well, but the vulcanized rubber tire is over 150 years old so it's out of protection, although patented rubber mixes do still exist. Coke and Pepsi have gone to war in the past as well, their formulas and advertising logos are patented and trademarked to protect their brands from others. Everything you just mentioned, you talk about nobody suing over IP, it happens all the time, you just aren't aware of it, sometimes because you're not privy to those details, others because they're just big corporations taking down little companies pirating their designs.
Hasbro doesn't own IP for any ol' robot transforming into another thing, but they do own the rights to anything that looks like their characters, and they own the technical rights to the way their toys interact with each other.
Hasbro can only sue for TF TOY IP theft if that company has taken existing toy molds & has copied it down 100%. different colors,different molded parts & sizes make it altered & no longer hasbro's original 100% design. these 3rd party TF toy companies are creating brand new molds that hasbro never created,the names are different,the fiction is different. So this is all legal.
That's not remotely correct. It only has to be based around their INTELLECTUAL PROPERTY to be a violation. And the fiction that is closely tied to Hasbro products is a violation of Hasbro's rights because it's based around their IP. Your understanding here is very far off-base.
Bandai in America was/is successful using the Words "transforms/transforming" to describe the change process in their power rangers USA toy line. I'm sure hasbro tried to sue & prevent bandia from using those "transforms/transforming" words but they most likely lost that law suit & bandai won it.
No, Hasbro's not stupid, they know "transforming" is a common verb and cannot be trademarked, they wouldn't try. If Bandai advertised their products as TRANSFORMERS, then they'd have a lawsuit. Hasbro recently sued computer-maker Asus for releasing a tablet called the "Transformer Prime", they allowed the previous "Transformer" pads in the line to go but "Prime" was really pushing it too far. (The judge felt it wasn't a violation of their trademark because it's a different industry, but I think Hasbro is going to appeal as they should because it's a gross violation.) If Bandai released a Zord that looked like Bruticus or Optimus Prime or another TF character, Hasbro might sue.
It boggles my mind why hasbro is upset about 3rd party TF toys. but Hasbro is not upset about fans creating all those custom/kitbashed TF toys & selling them on ebay for a profit. surely custom TF toys are far worse because most who create them use cheap paint that flakes off & can be eaten by kids. most TF fans who customize TF toys alter the design,create un-safe edges on the toy. having sticky/cracked painted TF toys with un-safe sharp things comming out of everywhere has got to be leaps & bounds worse than these 3RD Party TF toys.
Hasbro has no problem with customs because they aren't made for profit or for sharing, they are clearly hand-made items meant to express a single fan's passion. 3rd party products however are using Transformers likenesses without license and are often solely designed to interact with Hasbro products as their main selling point. Hasbro has expended tremendous resources to make its Transformers brand and characters uniquely recognizable, they've paid writers to come up with characters, paid comic book companies and cartoon production houses to create entertainment and characters, paid designers to created toys which are a specific vision and quality, all of which speaks to their brand. What reasonable justification can a 3rd party company have to make profits off Hasbro's work while paying them no license? And Hasbro requires a level of quality from their products - voluntary safety requirements which keep parts from choking kids or breaking off in falls, and which keep lead paint and toxic materials out of their products - none of which is assured on a 3rd party item, yet those 3rd party items are seen somewhat as extensions of the Transformers brand, why shouldn't Hasbro get say in that sort of thing?
In closing,The billionare companies are the evil ones not the fans nor the fans that create small time/low budget companies to please other fans via 3rd party TF toy companies. Sorry,I have zero compassion for Hasbro as far as their issues with IP theft from 3rd party companies. Because hasbro is no saint,their a greedy billionare company examples: (1) instead of supplying jobs to people who live in america or the UK or canada where they sell their toys to. Hasbro choses to outsource jobs over seas to other countries in order to get cheap labor & no unions monitoring bad working conditions. (2) Hasbro clearly plays the trade marks & patents stealing/holding games like other toy companies do. all in a desperate effort to make the other company go crazy,lose profits or prevent stuff from getting made & stocked in stores. (3) It's no surprise,Hasbro has poorly trained staff that doesn't even know how their products are selling in stores. at a few botcons,hasbro was not aware that the last waves of RTS & PCC didn't hit USA stores in decent volume. the over shipping of bumblebee is killing/preventing TF toy lines & assortments from getting restocked. (4) It should come as no surprise that the Hasbro company & it's higher ranking employess have been playing hard-hard ball,tricks & using punishment tactics to hurt Takara.The main reasons Hasbro chose not to import the robot masters new molds/repaints & Alternity figures was to punish takara for taking creating stuff that was their sole idea. Hasbro could have easily sold alternity figures as deluxe sized movie verse human alliance toys or movie toys or classics toys. robotmasters could have easily become energon/cybertron basics or classics basics. Hasbro knew takara needed their support due to hasbro getting the most volume units out of the TF molds due to hasbro distributing toys worldwide. (5) I suspect hasbro is the reason were not seeing other toy lines robots that change into alt modes. all those cool japanese robots that change into stuff & we don't see them sold in american retail stores. Hasbro keeps preventing bandia from releasing any machine-robo/gobots toys in american retail stores. due to tonka merging with hasbro & hasbro swipping up the gobots names & brand name. bandai made a combiners machine-robo toy line in the late 1990's that they were unable to sell in american retail stores thanks to hasbro's lawyers.
That seems like a very simplistic view of things. Yes, Hasbro is a high-value company, but they're high-value because they insist on a level of quality, they make smart investments, they develop lasting IP such as Transformers and nurture it. Hasbro supplies plenty of jobs in America, just not manufacturing ones, but that is a global economics issue affecting every single toymaker out there - #1 Mattel has been manufacturing in the orient for decades, China and Taiwan and such, to remain profitable in a market that simply will not accept a lower quality at the existing price or existing quality at a higher price that would come with manufacturing in the US; even #3 LEGO has moved some of their manufacturing out of Billund, Denmark to China and to Eastern Europe.
Hasbro hasn't shown any malicious attacks on rival companies that I can remember, they've defended their IP when reasonable but they haven't gone after Bandai for releasing transforming robot toys - they're not like Apple suing Android makers with nitpicky little stuff in a mad attempt to retake the market, Hasbro doesn't sue Spinmaster and insist that their Bakugan products get held in customs until the lawsuit is finished the way Apple just did with HTC's newest phones. It is entirely reasonable and legal for Hasbro to defend their IP, and they could ethically take it even further and be jackbooted thugs without really losing face. Sure, their inattentiveness to a small subset of their market base has been a big cause of the rise of 3rd party companies, but that doesn't mean they throw away their rights.
Product getting to stores is outside Hasbro's chain, Hasbro works with retailers for a reasonable pacing, but all they can control directly is manufacturing and shipment to the retailers, retailers then are responsible for distribution and ordering. They haven't been doing a great job there lately, but I don't see how this should release them of their right to protect their brand.
I have no idea what you're talking about on item 4 regarding hardball and punishment with Takara, that seems like pure fantasy, I haven't seen anything remotely suggesting what you're talking about. Hasbro was never going to import Alternity, I have no idea what you're talking about with Robot Masters, and Takara seemed really happy with Hasbro at Botcon last year.
Bandai couldn't release Machine Robo/Gobots because they sold the distribution rights to Tonka who DID release Gobots before Hasbro bought Tonka. Bandai has had several transforming robot lines, Mattel released Voltron before those rights floated around in the '90s, even the knockoff line Walmart carries now has its own original molds. What lines aren't getting brought here from Japan that are way on your radar as being held down by Hasbro? Keep in mind, Machine Robo Rescue and Mugenbine couldn't be released here because BANDAI sold their distribution rights to Tonka/Hasbro - why should Hasbro pay Bandai to distribute their molds which have no entertainment support or brand recognition when Hasbro already has their own in-house molds and brand to support in the same market?
Onslaught Six wrote:I don't think so, Tim. The engines, you've got me on, but that's TF Vehicle License, where they change the thing enough that it's sorta-kinda a different vehicle (like how Universe Sideswipe and Sunstreaker aren't technically any one model of Lamborghini, but the front part of one and the back part of another) and also for stuff like transformation. The engines gotta be huge because they're Scourge's shoulders.
The engines AND the landing gear though, really, from a vehicle that was mocked up to look like a larger vehicle because it was a scale testbed model of that larger vehicle? And this idea that the engines had to be the shoulders is backwards thinking, they didn't have to be the shoulders, the original Scourge didn't have shoulders as engines. Sunstreaker wasn't a Gallardo crossed with a Tonka Truck though, it was vehicles in the same scale as each other. Scourge is not a huge plane crossed with a tiny model airplane, everything on the X-48 Drone is there because it's a scale model of a larger vehicle, you're arguing that Scourge IS the scale concept model rather than the production version that concept model is intending to represent.
I don't see how--for one thing, these are new designs that transform into something else. There's no fiction to go with these but I've always assumed that it's taking place in some weird G1 offshoot where the 1986 movie never happened, and the war has just continued on indefinitely since then. It's entirely possible that some members of the Aerialbots or Combaticons have been killed and the remaining members got new bodies that couldn't combine.
To me, Onslaught exists as an individual character and the Combaticons have a whole group dynamic that doesn't really necessitate that they combine.
They're not in new fiction, they are G1-based characters. Your logic is giving too much credit, by that thinking literally ANYTHING AND EVERYTHING could have happened, Onslaught could have become leader of the Autobots and also a transforming slug. How many Onslaughts are not combiners? Only this Universe figure. When has Onslaught played a role that wasn't with his Combaticons? I don't know of one.
Universe Galvatron was, allegedly, going to be an Ultra, and then got scaled down in favour of putting Onslaught in that spot. They didn't redesign the toy at all, they just shrunk it down. In other words, the Ultra-sized Galvatron would've been basically the same toy we got, just bigger. And that's a crappy toy! I'd rather we have a tiny crappy Galvatron than a huge crappy one, and if we got a huge Galvatron, I wish his altmode wouldn't be a regular tank again.
I like that Galvatron, and the figure WAS designed to be a deluxe not merely scaled down tooling, here's the exact words they gave us:
TFviews.com: Was the recent Universe Galvatron originally designed to be an Ultra vehicle, and was scaled down? There seems to be a strong belief by fans on this one that the complex nature of the figure’s design and transformation, not to mention the stature of the character himself, suggest that this mold was originally destined for a larger scale and then dialed back. Any truth to that?
Hasbro: Galvatron was initially thought of as being an Ultra or Voyager scale. I wanted him big, he IS Galvatron after all. But we already had larger tank-like vehicles in the Universe line, such as Onslaught and Dropshot/Scattershot. So he was actually moved to Deluxe while he was still in the sketching stage. So he was actually designed and engineered to be a deluxe from pretty much the start, though having him larger would have been my preference.
They get a pass because Reprolabels need a figure for you to put stickers on. Their operation started purely as reproduction stickers for existing figures who had stopped being released decades ago--with the exception of a few reissued guys from 1984-86. I mean, I don't exactly see Hasbro reissuing Hun-Grrr any time soon. So if I find a decent condition one with shitty stickers, what am I supposed to do? Scour the world for an intact Hun-Grrr sticker sheet, pay way too much, and hope that the glue still works after 20 years? Screw that, I'll pay for reproduction stickers, which are priced very affordably and reasonably--I don't doubt for a second that Reprolabels' prices are at least 75-90% the cost of actually printing and developing the stickers, and the rest is profit which probably goes to keeping the website up or even buying old sticker sheets that are intact so they can scan them (or however they do this--I dunno how it works).
Now, obviously since then they've started offering "upgrade kits" for toys both old and newer toys that are currently being released. In that case, the only IP theft they're really doing is stealing the Autobot and Decepticon logos (and some design cues from earlier Hasbro toys) simply so people can buy them and...put them on their new Hasbro toys. Hasbro doesn't offer stickers for their new toys; they don't give you an extra sheet of 20 Autobot symbols in four sizes for you to put wherever you want on Bumblebee. Reprolabels require a Hasbro toy to put them on to make any sense at all (unless you just want to put a big Autobot sticker on your laptop or something). This is the same thing as with weapon packs, or the iGear Kup heads (which I even bought). iGear made new heads that resembled the way he looked in AHM--an official TF comic, mind you!--made them very affordable ($12 for two heads, a box, a screwdriver, and shipping from Asia!) and, more importantly, made a thing that you had to have a Hasbro product to enjoy. If iGear had instead made their own Kup figure who looked exactly like Kup looked in AHM, but cost $60, I'd pass on it, because I don't need to spend $60 on Kup--especially a whole new Kup from a shady third party company that might not have good engineering practices, and definitely not when there's a fresh Kup from Hasbro for $12.
That's the key difference. Entire figures, wholesale? Not cool. New heads, stickers, guns, trailers? Cool.
That is entirely splitting hairs, the stickers are Hasbro IP, Reprolabels are unlicensed recreations of that work and are a for-profit business. City Commander and Protector are items you need a figure to enjoy as well, how is that different? If this was a court of law, it wouldn't be different, but because it's paper and not plastic goods or because it's an add-on it's somehow a free pass. Yet they are the same thing, we just choose to look at them differently.
Here's my take on it, and this comes purely from growing up as someone who took the toys as their primary canon: However big the toy is, that's how big the character is. Soundwave's toy is taller than Megatron's? Then guess what; Soundwave is taller than Megatron. Powerglide might turn into a huge jet, but his toy is a Minibot, so to me, he's a tiny guy.
I can understand Hasbro's insistence on making guys who have big altmodes into big toys, and I'll allow it on those grounds. That's the direction they've taken and I'll defend it in that way. Doesn't mean I actually like it though. (Mind you, some of these characters I'm less pissy about than others. Warpath is pretty good as a Deluxe, and him hanging out with Flak and Guzzle from DOTM is neat.)
Says the guy who just argued that a character who was once a combiner can "grow" out of that role. That seems entirely contradictory to me.
I know, right? In fact, I seem to remember Archer (or someone else) responding like that when they were first approached at a Botcon over the third-party thing. Someone was all "HAY WHAT DO YOU THINK OF WARBOT DEFENDER" and Archer (or, again, someone else) basically said, "Hey, if they had just come to us and asked if they could do this, we might have let them, but now they're doing it trying to skirt around our IP and we have to crush them. It's just...taking a while."
It was at Botcon '09, and it wasn't Archer, it was Greg Lombardo, here's what I wrote up from that Saturday panel's Q&A:
- A lot of Fansproject-type stuff, do you see how much people want them, how they could be cheaper if they were mass-produced? Greg answers for this in a serious tone. These are things Hasbro wouldn't do because there's no mass appeal, not to say they aren'g good ideas. But it's becoming blatant infringement on Hasbro's Transformers intellectual property, and that's serious stuff. They had to work on correcting the fans' takes on knockoffs last year. Some of these fans project-type stuff have GONE TOO FAR. It's opening Hasbro's eyes to the reality of what used to be a fun fan sharing exeperience now becoming counterfeits, infringement on their I.P.. They don't like it, it's gone too far, and they're looking hard at it.
And he was PISSED during that answer, it was intense. I have audio of it, but it sounds like crap from my setup.
It's best to just go read the thread, but here's the rundown: Morrison said something about Batman being gay now in an interview (with Playboy) which we largely suspect is Morrison trolling for reactions. Prowl said that, and then said "If anyone in the Bat-Family would be outed as gay, it'd be Tim Drake," and listed a few things and talked about how there are (apparently) obvious gay overtones between Tim and Superboy. Dom steps in and goes, "If they made Tim Drake gay, that would just justify people who misread the text and write gay fanfiction." In other words, people who are fulfilling an audience need that the IP owner (in this case DC) isn't fulfilling.
Dom says he's okay with third party stuff (fulfilling a hole in the market via fan works) but in the other thread he says he's not okay with Tim Drake becoming gay, because that would be justifying fan works. The same thing Hasbro is (arguably) trying to do by releasing Bruticus.
(If we're going to continue this I'd rather we go back to the comics thread. These posts are getting huge again!)
I'll just let it lie, it sounds really annoying. Also, I looked it up just now and am officially ignoring anything Grand Morrison says about anything, his statement makes no sense at all except, as you said, trolling.
I liked a fair amount of the DOTM stuff I bought and have kind of really gotten into Cyberverse lately. In the last 12 months, that means all the way up to when I got Kup, Scourge, Warpath, Thundercracker and Wheeljack, who I liked very much. Black Shadow was cool. I wanted the hell out of DOTM Soundwave before he was cancelled. I waffled on Skyhammer for a while but I really wish I'd picked him up because he looked cool. I liked HA Tailpipe and Reverb and Icepick wasn't bad either. That's no more or less than what I usually like from a line!
List it though, 12 months, list the official product you've REALLY liked that came out since last May. There hasn't even been that much stuff, it shouldn't be difficult. "Icepick wasn't bad either" doesn't come off as "liked" so much as "tolerated". Kup and Scourge were released about 15 months ago, Warpath 13 months, Thundercracker and Wheeljack 14 months, at some point there should be a cutoff but I'll let it pass. You currently have:
Kup
Scourge
Wheeljack
Thundercracker
Warpath
Sky Shadow (not a glowing endorsement tho')
Tailpipe
Reverb
That's out of 7 Generations molds, 9 DOTM commanders (I'm leaving Legion out because that'll skew this so far off that it's a data-killer), 20+ DOTM deluxes, 10 DOTM HA basics, 6 DOTM voyagers, 2 DOTM HA new molds, 4 DOTM supreme or largers, 3 TFP convention exclusives that were easy to get online from HTS, 4 TFP commanders, 6 TFP deluxes not counting First Edition or just-hitting sets, and 2 TFP voyagers. That's 73 larger-than-Legion figures in the last year or so, from which you've named 8.
Who the hell wouldn't be satisfied with DOTM Powerglide? It's pretty much everything you could ever want from a Powerglide update, and it's even in a small scale! I mean, the worst thing you could say about it are some problems with it as a toy but as a Representation Of Powerglide it pretty much hits everything you could ask for. Problems with a toy on an engineering level can't be lumped into that; otherwise everybody would already be asking for a new Jazz because of his weird thighs and angled feet. If you ask me, every once in a while you gotta go, "Well, that's what they gave us," and you either buy it or you don't. I mean, Classics Prime is a G1 Prime update, but he has big truck fronts hanging off him, and his vehicle mode has a weird extra part on top. Do I constantly bitch to Hasbro (or third-party companies) that they should make a new Prime that specifically caters to me? No, I say, "Well, that's what they got. I can either buy it and deal with some things I don't necessarily like, or not buy it at all." (I did the former, and am glad I did, because I've grown to accept and like those elements.)
A G1 purist who doesn't want movie aesthetics - I can't display DOTM Powerglide with my Generations figures too easily, the detailing just doesn't match up well.
There will always be people who want to physically own a product that was manufactured professionally because of the (sometimes only implied) professional quality associated with that. When Devin Townsend puts out a new album, I buy it. Yeah, I already downloaded it when it leaked a month before the discs were even pressed, but I bought it anyway because Devin always had really cool artwork and extra crap in them, and because giving Devin money means he can continue to create music I like. Dom said something earlier about how we, as consumers, have no obligation to fund Hasbro to continue making things we like by buying things we don't--and I agree with that on some level but the fact is if I don't buy Devin's new album, he might not get the money to make the album after that. But at the same time, I wouldn't have bought Devin's lavish $80 6-CD 2-DVD box set with huge art, all four of his previous albums, tons of extra crap and sweet packaging if I didn't think all of the stuff in there was completely worth it.
3D printing in a few years will be better-than-manufactured quality, it'll be sharper can even be made pre-assembled. For smaller things on brief runs, the factories will soon stop cutting tooling for it and just 3D print, then a few years after that it'll either be in local kiosks or home units. There's no benefit to buying a City Commander shipped from China when you can bypass the overhead of manufacturing and shipping and storing to get it now, nobody gives a fart about the packaging on that sort of piece. What we'll be buying is the designs, Hasbro will still be mass-producing products for a while longer as it'll take longer for a large run thing to become more cost-effective, but on small runs it'll quickly turn that tide.
There's also no fiction to these; if there is, why the hell are they wasting their time creating G1 retreads? Make new crap! I'd love to see what some of these guys could do with some ORIGINAL ideas. For example, why hasn't someone done a DeLorean yet? You think I wouldn't want to pay $40 for that?
There's been quite a dearth of low-profile TF cars, the Delorean DMC-12 is very flat in person. The height on Universe Sideswipe/Sunstreaker is an example of Hasbro not making the car as flat as it should be compared to its width.
I do know Hasbro uses the word "converts" on their own packaging because they fear if they use "Transforms" then it might become a genericized word and they'd lose the trademark, like what happened with escalators. ("Escalator" was once trademarked, but it became so common that the trademark was deemed generic and now nobody can trademark it.)
I thought they used "converts" to remove the suggestion that the toy transforms on its own.
Dom wrote:ReproLabels does not make any stand alone product though. Just about everything that they make is intended to enhance of customize an existing toy that somebody has already bought. ReproLabels is a case study of the example Shockwave gave above.
That is not a legitimate excuse from a legal or ethical standpoint though, as I said above, it's not different than Protector or City Commander.
I could forgive some of the engineering problems as being part of a learning curve. Hasbro has never been particularly good at making Combiners, and has not even made a serious attempt for almost 3 years.
But, releasing the correctly coloured variant as a convention exclusive is just inexplicably stupid of them. (At this point, Hasbro has no excuse not to understand the importance of screen/page accuracy.)
A learning curve? They've been running this brand for 28 years now, it's unacceptable that they keep throwing the baby out with the bathwater every few years when they change design teams and management - figure it the hell out, or get the "brand partners" at TakaraTomy to do the heavy lifting in design like they often do.
Hasbro's thinking seems to be "pretty colors attract kids", it's the type of compromise I expect to see from someone on the Nerf design team, it's a swing too far from people who don't have a good grasp on what attracts casual consumer interests because they're using an outdated corporate playbook mentality.
In general terms, both are good toys and (particularly in Onslaught's case) good representations of the character.
Eh, Universe Onslaught is a bit simplistic in sculpt and transformation and articulation for a figure that price.
Legally, I agree with you.
But, Hasbro and their defenders are not shy about taking a huffy moral stance. So, my response is morally dismissive.
My stance on this has, and still is, that I will buy official/legit when possible. But, if nobody wants to sell me a legit copy, then I am open to buying knock-offs or other unofficial product.
Agreed, although I do feel that Hasbro has some justification even morally, just as the 3rd Party crew enjoy some justification. They have created a moral DMZ, and Hasbro's got to change how they confront their consumers if they truly want this to stop, they can't merely beat drums and threaten broad sweeping actions as it won't address the underlying problem they themselves created.
That is still a long way off. Even after the 3D fax becomes widely available, and the plastic quality it produces makes this commercially viable, Hasbro will have to adjust the marketing of their products to present them as model kits, not action figures.
I wasn't talking about Hasbro mass-production, only 3rd Party companies.
O6 wrote:The sad thing is, for as much as I bitch, I'm eyeing Cyclops Commander or whatever he's called. Hearts of Steel Shockwave. But, unlike Devastator or Springer, Hasbro has actually said they'll never make that design, which makes it more fair game than, say, Bruticus.
And ulitmately that's the bottom line, Hasbro has created a problem for their own market, refuses to address it, and removed all hope, so they are left with no other choice if they want that product, SOMEONE will fill that vacuum because of demand whether or not there's a profit turned because Hasbro has cultivated passion for something and then refused to address that passion - and for NO REASON AT ALL really, they don't see profit in small-market and even boutique sales but obviously there must be some or else we wouldn't be having this damned conversation in the first place, it's just that those small-run profits don't fill Hasbro's gigantic stupid corporate overhead needs.
I'd say something like, "But then we run the risk of no new Transformers being produced ever," but we saw what happened when Hasbro ignored the GI Joe market in the early-mid 2000s. (Granted, this is partially because GI Joe failed to appeal to kids, probably not helped by America being involved in a widely-disagreed upon war. The early 2000s were not a good time to be marketing a toyline about soldiers fighting terrorists.) The line didn't appeal to kids, so collectors became the main base for it, and the collectors didn't like what was being put out, and boom--no more GI Joe. Then Hasbro figured, fuck it, if the collectors are the market, give in to it. Then the 25th line happened and, surprise, GI Joe was pretty much a success. (They faltered with the movie line, and since GI Joe has had a plethora of weird distribution issues, but that's hopefully changing.)
Well, the early 2000s situation also had a lot of 1:6 military figures coming out of Japan and selling pretty big here, lots of articulation and accessories for $40, sales mainly from that same GI Joe hardcore crowd, and Hasbro was losing those sales to Dragon and 21st Century Toys and others like that.
BWp wrote:I'm not way into the other forums, but are they really on a pedestal because they're 3rd party? It'd seem to me that they'd be on a pedestal because they are bucking the trend of letting Hasbro step on collectors' interests. If Hasbro delivered more to that market base, I think those fans would eschew 3rd party every time.
Hasbro’s not stepping on *all* the collectors’ interests, they certainly aren’t stepping on mine. Maybe I’m wrong for not screaming at them specifically to make a huge, awesome, expensive Devastator that doesn’t have to stay within a budget or pass a drop test, but as long as they’re continuously coming out with *some* cool stuff that I want (which admittedly is sparse right now, but that’s more on me for not liking TFPrime, since a lot of people clearly do like that line), then I’ll be happy that Transformers is still around. It’d be ridiculous for me to shit all over a children’s toyline because it’s not making the specific I characters I want with all the exact details I imagine they have, that’s absurd. I collect TFs because I happen to like what *Hasbro* does with them, not because I asked them to make things just for me and they did (I don’t think I’m describing this quite right, but I’m trying).
I'm sure if we dig far enough into your psyche, we could find something Hasbro didn't come through with, but let's pretend that's not even remotely possible - are you saying that you represent 100% of the market? Of course you're not, so can you not see how a different subset would feel stepped on? Look at O6 there with his Hearts of Steel Shockwave desire, that's Hasbro stepping on his interests. Canceled TF Animated Voyagers? That bugs me. Canceled DOTM figures? That bugs a lot of folks I know. Not releasing more Legends Cosmos and G1 Megatron and those guys? There isn't even a good excuse for that shit, they basically just forgot about them as they cycled through an entire brand team, they paid hard currency for those molds and then pissed that development money away on a short miserable run.
Also, the "it's just a kids toy line" thing doesn't hold as much water when you look at stuff like Generations and Masterpiece, stuff where Hasbro is clearly cultivating that old-school G1 fan audience, and using that mindset to drive brand recognition in pop culture.
I understand what you mean, you like what they make, not they make what you like, and that's how I am too TO A DEGREE, but there is a gray area when Hasbro is actively cultivating that hardcore fan audience, it's like they're pandering to them with one hand and then slapping them down with the other. The line should not be only insular and backward-looking, but Hasbro is intentionally looking back for market choices, so it's not cut and dried.
Also, "good basics" Hasbro hasn't been doing a lot of that either, "good" has been taking a back seat to "ok" and "bare minimum" and even "incompetent".
That’s your opinion. I think a good chunk of the Human Alliance Basics were great (ironically, Thunderhead was something I specifically had been wanting to see made for a very long time).
Those were not classic basics, they were priced closer to deluxe and sized closer to deluxe. I'm talking about stuff like Cyberverse Legion and Commander figures, like Cybertron Scout class, Energon Omnicons and Terrorcons.
Munitioner and Explorer look to be ‘good’ on the same level as toys they were released in the same time-frame as, like Skystalker and Breacher and Hubcap, or even the limb-bots that made up the repainted Energon combiners they were meant to interact with. Cool, sure, but not sixty-dollars-supporting-so-called-fans-who-steal-from-the-company-that-makes-the-toys-I-like worth of cool.
Ok, you named 3 good basics, I'd argue Hubcap is an "ok" basic with a nice alt mode, but the bottom line is there's been a LOT of basics that haven't lived up to "good" in the last few years, and not just because of Legion. And the Energon combiner basics are ok at best, they have soft sculpting and low articulation, ugly bolt-on junk to make hands and feet. If I wanted Bruticus from G1 that looked like the character, did the full gestalt thing, was larger, had better articulation and accessories, Hasbro flat out has not been able to deliver that by any stretch of the imagination, and certainly not compared to that Munitioner and Explorer versions - how can you say that Hasbro delivered Bruticus as this:
http://www.tfu.info/2005/Decepticon/Bru ... aximus.htm
better than this?
http://www.seibertron.com/transformers/ ... 095/1/154/
I really don't see how you could even say they're TRYING to. Let's try that again with FOC...
This is badass:
http://tfwiki.net/wiki/Image:FOC-Bruticusart.jpg
This is
just ass:
http://tfwiki.net/wiki/Image:Generation ... uticus.jpg
At best, Hasbro has some stupendous upfuckery going on there. I won't be buying Munitioner and Explorer, but the idea that the fans who want a good Bruticus are stealing from Hasbro? No, sorry, there is no comparison, and that's entirely Hasbro's fault.
I dunno about your take on FOC Bruticus. That figure is likely to cost $75, Onslaught is a very shabby-looking deluxe (look at the back of Bruticus, yuck), there's a lot of compromises, and then the GOOD coloring is a convention-exclusive boxed set. Hasbro did an ok-looking job but not a 3rd-party-killer the way you're suggesting.
It’s not like the third-party gestalts are perfect either. The components of Hercules have giant, obvious limbs jammed onto their backs in a step just-above partsforming, the vehicle modes are hardly stellar, and there were widespread reports of the front-blade portion of the not-Bonecrusher component shipping broken off or breaking off easily. And the whole thing costs over $500! For that price a toy better be friggin’ perfect. Meanwhile, in Hasbro’s camp, $75 will net you a full-size Bruticus with the major issue being, what, an Onslaught that looks gappy in the back? Big whoop, it still looks better for a much more reasonable price than the over-hyped, overpriced third-party crap.
Onslaught looks gappy in the front, he looks HORRIBLY gappy in the back. "Full size Bruticus" is a compromise, Onslaught being a Deluxe alone kills that, they had to stretch every last millimeter out of his arms and legs to get the gestalt to a reasonable height, so he's closer to full height but not remotely full SIZE. Some fans are going to give the 3rd Party designers the benefit of the doubt for the issues with Hercules because those 3rd party guys are new to this, Hasbro's been in the TF game for near on 30 years now and still delivers a lot of mediocrity and compromises, they have wasted a lot of goodwill by simply aiming low and charging high.
See, maybe it’s just me, but I always thought Classics Rodimus worked fine as either Hot Rod or Rodimus. There’s literally no visual difference between the two characters, Rodimus is just Hot Rod’s character model scaled up. And to say that Hasbro/Takara didn’t cater to that when they released, uh, Masterpiece Hot Rod/Rodimus Prime, is faulty, since that toy explicitly did fulfill that role.
First, let's be really clear, at no point was I talking about the MP figure, we were talking only about Classics Rodimus and the Protector add-on.
Now, as to MP Roddy, MP Rodimus Prime is not significantly taller than in Hot Rod mode, he's not carrying as much bulk, and there's no RP alt mode or trailer/battle station; so all you get is he's a centimeter taller and has a different face, and in vehicle mode he's... not home. So in terms of HASBRO, it didn't dutifully fulfill that role.
I still disagree with this. Seaspray was definitely an homage to G1 Seaspray, no disputing that, but he’s hardly meant to be a direct update. ROTF Brawn definitely homaged the G1 guy in ways, but was still clearly a new guy at the end of the day. Ditto Mindwipe. Seaspray’s in the same boat (ho-HO!) in my opinion.
Hasbro says you're wrong, he was designed as a CHUG figure which means he was intended to be the G1 character, thus explaining why his styling is clearly not movie-esque at all. Here are 2 answers to 2 different outlets over half a year apart confirming it both coming and going:
http://tfwiki.net/wiki/Hasbro_Q%26A/March_2010:_Answers
1. Is the new Voyager Sea Spray a character who lives in the live-action film universe?
Sea Spray is continuing under the design philosophy that we started with Classics line and continued through Universe. It is all about reimaging classic characters in a new, 21st century styling.
ActionFigs.com (Steve seems to have lost that article, so I'll have to grab it from my email)
AF.com: Lately, the Revenge of the Fallen line figures seem to have been moving away from the movie aesthetic, especially since the start of "Hunt for the Decepticons". Brimstone and Hubcap, Terradive and Tomahawk, Seaspray - even Human Alliance Jazz to some degree - those are all movie-line figures that feel in many ways more traditional in their styling. Was that shift away from some of the movie universe's more outlandish design stylings intentional with the latest toys, and what prompted that shift?
Hasbro: Brimstone, Hubcap, Terradive, Tomahawk and Seaspray do not exist in the movie world, so that would explain why they do not fit the aesthetic that was established in the first two movies. Our goal continues to be to design realistic vehicles that could exist in today's world that of course convert into cool looking figures, but at the same time are great toys to be played with. As such, some of the "design" aesthetics might change to fit character designs into the vehicle designs, thus the reason for the style change.
There ya have it, Seaspray is not Movie-verse by any intentions.
I’m turning 25 this month (next week, actually). It’s been an ominous, gnawing sense of dread that I haven’t been able to shake, like the end of the world is coming upon me and all my time has been wasted. I’m not ready to hit my mid-twenties, I’m still too young to be getting old!
I’m serious, I’m genuinely not sure if I can handle being 25-effin’-years old at the place that I’m at in life.
It's all in your head, you are only as old as you feel. You can treat each birthday as another road marker on your path to death, but eventually even that burns out - they're better as reminders of how far you come and how long it took to even get here, much less how long it'll take to get from here to 50 or 99 like my grandpa or 107 like my great-grandmother.
I don’t get this perception that Hasbro is ignoring the G1-remake market or telling them to screw off. I look to the right of my computer desk, and I’ve got a display case PACKED with G1-style Autobots and Decepticons. And a table next to me with even more because they won’t all fit in the case. Tons of guys that they’ve been releasing steadily for the past five years or so, with even more on the horizon, they’re hardly ignoring that market. Are there a few guys they haven’t gotten around to yet? Sure, I’d love to see them get around to Devastator. But that might supplant the new Shockwave they’re making, and that would make another portion of the fanbase bitch. Someone’s always going to be unhappy that Hasbro isn’t making what they specifically want, but that doesn’t give opportunistic third-party companies the right to steal their IP to cater to those few impatient, entitled fans. Don’t get me wrong, I applaud these companies for *wanting* to help their fellow fans out, but the way they’re going about it is illegal, disrespectful, shady, and makes me question how much of ‘fans’ they really are.
Where's a top-notch modern Devastator? Where's Hearts of Steel characters? Where's a gun for TFP Optimus that doesn't look like crap? Where's a good Rumble and Frenzy design? Where's WFC Warpath? Where's a Megatron figure that isn't brightly-colored? Where are PCC limbs that don't suck? G1 Brawn? Leader-class Blackout? A G1 Ironhide and Ratchet that aren't plagued with issues? Armor for CHUG Ultra Magnus? In-scale Leader-class Ironhide weapons? Zombie Cliffjumper's head? TFP Wheeljack's mouthplate-free face and grenade? G1 Hound and Ravage's accessories? Cosmos? I can apparently keep going with this, and I am leaning AWAY from the 3rd Party fans!
The idea that 1 toy might supplant another is not worth discussing, anything MIGHT happen, that's living in Hasbro fear, not Hasbro hope. Hasbro hope was "I hope they make some cool Hearts of Steel figures" and they dashed that to bits. Hasbro fear is "if we make something you want, we MIGHT not make something else you want" - we don't negotiate with terrorists like that.
While it doesn't give these companies legal right to do what they're doing, it does give fans the PASSION to do it, and those fans are behind some of these 3rd party products, and the opportunistic companies have crept in and filled the void not because they're stealing from Hasbro, but because Hasbro is refusing to address fan passion which is creating that void in the first place.
Springer’s a Triple-Changer? I know he turns into a helicopter, and sometimes the rotor blade comes off and that rotor-less helicopter drives around pretending to be a car, but I’d hardly call that a triple-changer.
Kup is a pickup truck with no tailgate or much of a bed.
But that’s getting too damn picky, isn’t it? Nothing is ever going to please anyone. I’m personally unhappy with Generations Jazz because he’s got a poor face-sculpt, door wings, and a chest that doesn’t lock down, but if some third-party came out with a tweak of the Jazz mold that fixes those problems I’d still tell them to get fucked, because pandering to my specific tastes isn’t a good enough excuse to ask me to pay $60 for a Deluxe toy that also rips off from the company that actually DOES produce the toys I like. Lots of people did like Generations Jazz, if I didn’t like it, that’s my problem. It certainly wasn’t maliciousness on Hasbro’s part, and it certainly doesn’t make them deserve to have their IP and their place in the market damaged by these people. If you don’t like it, don’t buy it, but actively sabotaging the company that makes it because you think the children’s action figures they produce should cater specifically to you is a bit low.
No it's not getting "too picky", if it was TOO picky there wouldn't be enough money behind it driving the 3rd party item to exist as anything other than a one-off. If it was TOO picky, then there wouldn't be enough of an audience to create the market for it.
So Generations Jazz, you wouldn't buy a better one at $50, but would you buy a replacement head and something to lock down the chest and a pack of character-accurate stickers for $16 shipped? I bet you might be tempted, I bet a lot of people would. And that's the margin I'm talking about, it's not as black and white as you want to believe. You bought Generations Jazz and he sucked, you wouldn't buy him again it sounds like, so how exactly is a 3rd party version sabotaging Hasbro if they're only going to rerelease that shoddy Jazz anyway which you won't buy? That is around the same margin as the PCC limbs you have no problem with.
It’s all still supporting DC and the Batman brand though. If you’re a fan of Batman, and you dropped $60 on a Maketoys Myparentsaredeadman instead of a Mattel or DC Direct figure of Batman, then that’s sixty dollars of a Batman fan’s Batman money (which might have been spent on Batman comics, or shirts, or DVDs, not just toys) that didn’t go to the people who own Batman.
But DC Direct is its own company, it has to make profits to survive, so try again.
What? Optimash Prime was the Mr. Potato Head Prime they made to tie in with the Movie line. Revoltech is a line of clicky-jointed highly posable figures based on licensed properties (mostly mecha and sci-fi). Kawaguchi made Optimus Prime, Megatron, Starscream, Hot Rod, plus Movie Prime and Bumblebee. They licensed the IP and made their own toys of the characters that catered to what a subsection of the fandom wanted.
I know what Revoltech is, they take existing character licenses and put them on their buck body design, it is no different from Optimash Prime -- someone took the concept of one brand and applied it to another brand. It is not TF-figure related though, at best Revoltech TF could be related to Action Masters, they don't transform and they don't have interplay with regular TFs. So it's apples and oranges.
Source on this? How much are licensing fees, anyway? Would the third-part companies really suffer from having to pay them for such things, or would their profit margins just go down a bit?
See quotes above, plus Hasbro's answer to a fan question at the Singapore CybertronCon back in March "We do not condone what they [3rd party manufacturers] do and would never work with them."
Hasbro does not have a set license fee but for a one-off think around $25,000 to $100,000 buy-in (assuming your existing relationship level with Hasbro, which also is a very difficult thing to get an "in" with on your own, you have to know people who know people) plus a lot of requirements and then fees are I believe an upfront and then a piece of every pie, with a floating schedule depending on expected volume. And as for the profit margins on 3rd party figures, you are assuming they are high, I am assuming based on my knowledge of small-scale manufacturing that it's actually a very thin margin, so without hard numbers to support one theory or the other, I could not say if the profit margins would "just go down a bit" - you believe there's a lot of money they're collecting, and I am saying that they likely have very thin margins to make it work at these low volumes for the cost of prototyping, developing full tooling (cutting steel alone is around $100,000 with hardware), factory paint and manufacturing, and packaging and shipping.
Then they should look into these things and *find out* who they should go to for a license. It may be hard, but that just means they should *try harder*. Getting a job and making money is hard, but that doesn’t give me the right to walk into a bank and hold the place up instead.
Except we're not talking about walking into Hasbro's factory and stealing molds or any physical items of any kind, hell we're not even talking about justifying remolding existing figures the way the Knock Off types were doing last decade. You're giving the ok to PCC limbs, they work with existing IP, they are intended to work with existing IP, but it's ok because it's only 1 level of IP theft and not another.
You can’t give someone making money off of someone else’s ideas a pass on IP theft just because going through the proper channels was ‘hard’.
Ok, so let's burn Hasbro and Takara to the ground! Oh wait, you've entirely ignored my point about Hasbro starting the Transformers brand on IP theft, which makes them
just as guilty of robbing banks. Well, that's the thing, what's good for the goose is good for the gander, you talk a lot of game about these 3rd party start-ups stealing IP being thieves, yet you ignore Hasbro and Takara doing the same thing in the early '80s except at the time they surely weren't start-ups, they simply knew they could get away with it, and when they realized they no longer could get away with it as easily they had amassed enough money off that stolen IP to buy licenses and do a slightly better job of stealing from those they couldn't.
I tend to take some issue with Reprolabels, because for one I’ve always felt their stuff seemed rather overpriced, but then again what the hell do I know about sticker production? I also dislike that they seem to aggressively push G1-inspired deco-‘upgrades’ on toys that…really have no need for them, but that’s neither here nor there. Like Six, their general practices are okay in my book since they’re selling you stuff to compliment an existing Hasbro product you already purchased, though I would express concern over them selling stickers of the existing faction symbols, particularly since there have been official products of that sort before. On the other hand, Hasbro might not worry about it themselves, since they know anyone with a printer, some sticker paper and access to TFwiki could print out their own faction symbols.
What happened to "that doesn't give the right to walk into a bank and hold the place up"? If any jackass could print their own repro labels, and surely they pretty much can, then why is Reprolabels who is a for-profit company getting a free pass in your book? Because it's a gray area, that's why. Because you'll condone one type of IP theft but not another since they are at different levels. Where's the argument that Hasbro could in the future sell packs of those G1 stickers and we're stealing from that potential option? Where's the indignation at Reprolabels not getting a license to sell their wares despite them coming directly from copyrighted and trademarked images of another entity? There isn't one, nobody complains about it despite it being the same, that's a DOUBLE STANDARD - best G1 figure of the '80s.
("Double Standard" as a G1 character has so many un-PC jokes that could be made in a bio note alone that I'm giggling at just the idea! One side could be a fem-bot who is a medic while the other side is a male-bot that has big high-ranking officer stripes.
Oh man, Dom is gonna pop when he sees that one.)
I’ve never understood this reasoning for GI Joe not performing well. Doesn’t every teen, child, and unborn fetus have a raging hard-on for Call of Duty and Battlefield? They seriously can’t get these kids to buy war toys?
It seems to finally be cooling with EA ruining the Battlefield series so hugely, and COD going into the future. I think the real issue though is that GI Joe figures are pretty shitty for the price, the sculpts are soft or bland (it seems to be one or the other every time), the paint is often glossy and cheesy, the accessories are old, the articulation doesn't hold poses, the thumbs break off, they stopped making vehicles, and they have been coasting for way too long on the original cartoon characters instead of nurturing new entertainment (they dropped the ball with the last movie, and they didn't nurture Renegades), GI Joe has become pretty much the most insular thing I've ever seen in that way - even when they make new characters, it's "how can we make this fit in with the oldest old thing we have?"
I really really disagree with this assertion! First off, Hasbro actually recognized the demand for the darker-colored Bruticus, and deigned to release it! And it’s being sold as an SDCC exclusive, which means it’ll actually be fairly simple to get (seriously, Hasbro’s SDCC exclusive TFs from LAST YEAR are still available on HTS. This isn’t the same sort of ‘exclusivity’ as, say, Botcon). Being sold like this means that these colors, which the fans asked for, are being sold directly, specifically to the fans! The kiddies can have the bright-colored ones sold individually that they’ll have to find at retail and possible never complete, while Hasbro’s making this desirably-colored, sold-as-a-giftset version just for us! Fans wanted the darker colors, they wanted it sold in a giftset, and they didn’t say it but I bet they wanted to not have to compete with kids at retail too, and Hasbro’s giving fans exactly what they wanted. And of course fans are STILL bitching about it.
You have drunk too much of the Hasbro kool-aid, you are assuming that kiddies WANT the bright colors, and that those young kiddies are going to be the driving force behind the mainline versions of those figures. Now instead of the fanbase taking them away from retail, the fans are going to look to the SDCC exclusive version and the retail is going to struggle since those fans won't be coming to them. Moreover, the kiddie set isn't going to have enough scratch to take all 5 figures away at once, so there's either going to be imbalance or there's going to be frustration-cum-apathy at retail from those buyers. So the colors are going to MAYBE draw in the younger kiddies (who will find the product too complex to use anyway) but drive away other casual consumers, and push collectors right out of retailers altogether. Of course fans are going to bitch about it, it's a bad call.
Dom wrote:SDCC Bruticus is great for fans. But, it shafts casual buyers. Casual buyers are the guys who bought the game and played it. They liked the game and now want a Bruticus that looks right. They might not even know to look for the correctly coloured SDCC Bruticus. If they see the incorrectly coloured mass release toy, they might just shrug and give up. (Most reasonable people are not going to search online for a correctly coloured toy when the toy they saw at Wal*Mart was incorrectly coloured.)
Hasbro could have released the correctly coloured Bruticus at retail to begin with, and done something better (such as "premium" paint work or something) for SDCC.
Agreed.
What ‘casual customers’? There’s kids who will buy it in stores because the brighter colors catch their attention and it otherwise looks like the one in the game they played (or because it’s a big, awesome, combining robot and kids like big awesome things), but aside from fans who actually know about the SDCC version (IE: the crowd who would want to attend SDCC) how many ‘casual’ fans of the game are going to have an interest in buying this toy? Your average Chad from Beta Rush Omega who plays FoC on Xbox Live for a month with his friends before selling it back to Gamestop isn’t going to be caught dead buying these things, regardless of what color they are. There are two markets for this thing: the kids who’ll bug their parents to buy it when they see it in a store while they’re out grocery shopping, and the fans who can rub two internet sticks together and order the damn thing off HTS, and Hasbro was actually willing to make two different versions to cater specifically to each of those demographics. I see no problem with this.
Casual consumers generally will be just-pre-teen and young-teen boys, casual consumer old-school fans in their 20s and 30s who are buying for themselves, and parents and gift-givers who have some level of understanding of the brand, that's the rest. Also, in this case you have to add gamers, they have come out en masse for action figures lately, SW and TF have both had big pushes from them where they buy mainly only from their own game interests, and some of them branch into the rest of the lines to bolster their purchases. Retailers are counting on ALL of them as well as hardcore fans to come to their stores for the SOLID WAVE of Fall of Cybertron Bruticus which has no transitional cases from the previous waves, that's a lot of faith. But they're going to have a hard friggin' time looking at Rainbow Maximus there.
Because these guys don’t have the rights to make money off Hasbro’s ideas without their permission. The only reason ‘fans’ are buying Hercules or anything like it is because they like Devastator, a character Hasbro owns the rights to, which Hasbro has spent time and money promoting and keeping in the public eye. These third-party companies owe Hasbro a cut of what they make since Hasbro’s the only reason they can sell these things at the price they do in the first place. It’s the same way you rip on FunPub for making exclusives that play on the popularity of characters IDW uses, except these guys have absolutely no right to ride Hasbro’s coattails this way.
If I produced an action figure of Christopher Walken, and sold it to people who really like Christopher Walken and wanted a toy of him, then I owe Christopher Walken some of the money I made off that action figure, since the things he did are what allowed me to sell that toy and make that money off his likeness in the first place. You can’t just make money off of someone else’s work, someone else’s ideas, without getting their permission and, realistically, sharing some of that money with them.
Freightliner, Porsche, Lancia, Datsun, Pontiac, McDonnell Douglas, Walther, Volkswagen, Gerard Ducarouge, Gitanes & Marlboro, Lamborghini, Toyota, Willys, Mazda, Fairchild Republic, Chevrolet, Mitsubishi, Bell Helicopters, Ferrari, and NASA circa 1984-85 all might have something to say about that.
Shock wrote:Transrepro.com. Ken, the guy that was running it had a stroke and that's why he went out of business. This is actually what lead to my friend and I researching how to repro TF parts.
Sucks to hear that's why it went that way. Talk to Jeremy Sung at Spy Monkey Creations
http://www.spymonkeycreations.com/ he was a fan who became a design student and then turned his skills into his own figure-accessories design house, he might be able to give you some insight in how to get into that sort of realm.
BTW, it's funny how these things work, the repro accessories market was huge for Star Wars about 10 years ago, but they started leaking into recarded vintage figure auctions and have made a disaster of that brand, so they're sorta demonized now in SW.
