Originally Posted by imfallenangel
Like all capitalist company it's about maximizing profit.
They do not care to lose 100 customer, if they get to produce 1/3 of products and still have 30 customers that are paying multiple times the actual value and still making more money than if they sold at lower prices to more customers.
Their target audience are the ones that has the most money and to take as much as these peoples will accept to give them, it's as simple as that.
Look at the fundme for Unicron.. people lines up to bend over and were shouting how great it was to overpay... I don't aim to offend, but to be honest about the fact that this was a social experiment to see if they would have the numbers to justify such a price, and those that threw themselves on the pile, did just that.
How much does it cost? Plastic prices are at a very low point at this time. Technology has made mold production a LOT cheaper than ever before with much better precision than how they were done just 10 years ago (so less testing and redos of molds due to defects). If anything, prices should be the same, of even lower at this point... but supply and demand has made them to simply pull more money in but doing less.
When you see a lot of figures being produced dirt cheap that ends up as "KOs" that are just as good but at 1/2 or even as much as 1/4 of the "original" price and still making a decent profit, when you see 3rd parties able to make excellent original figures (or other toys) at still a much lower price, and many times, much better quality than Hasbro does, when you see that Hasbro is making huge profits on their quarterly/yearly reports, then at some point, you have to realize that Hasbro is absolutely in it for the money and it overpricing these figures by a lot, simply because they know that they will sell enough, even in smaller numbers but larger prices, to make money by the truckload.
To think otherwise is to not understand these points that are quite a reality.
At this point, if the Siege and ER figures hadn't been done with better plastic and improved engineering, if they didn't go with the characters that would appeal the most (and they keep measuring responses and activity about what people are still asking for), only to ensure interest, there would have been a huge decline in their sales as for the kids, most that's out there now, it expensive and not that great to be honest, but they do manage to do figures that has just enough appeal to draw people in.
Siege and ER has a few amazing figures, but as I've repeatedly stated, they do act with the "this is good enough, it'll sell" for almost all figures.
The gaps, the lack of decent accessories, being my main pet peeve for just about every of these figures.
I've never had to buy as many 3rd party add-on kits, never had to paint or customize as much as I have with my figures as I've done in the last year... all because they are all missing that little extra that would make the figures "too good" I guess, for Hasbro.
Every figure that I find amazing but lacks that little "extra" push that should be there, pushes me further and further from future purchases... and that's on Hasbro.
|
