Quote:
Originally Posted by JohnathanKong
I'm not discounting that unicron is expensive, but some 3rd party combiners are just as expensive, like feral rex. Is the difference that those are 6 smaller robots vs one large robot? Do you think it would have been better if it came in multiple parts like FT Omega Supreme?
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Sadly, it's turned into a "how much will people pay" for every companies, main ones or 3rd parties alike.
Some I can absolutely understand some higher costs, but so many... nah. there's no justification in the pricing.
When you can see some dollar store stuff being mass produced and sold at a few dollars, including Transformers at a few instances, that were selling at 3x the price in regular stores.
Yes, there's the dev costs, but I'd rather see a market with a decent saturation instead of the way things are now, where it's hard to find a LOT of figures, so many "exclusives", and so many so overpriced items that many just can't afford them.
Just to give perspective
(disclaimer, I'm just estimating these figures from the bits and pieces I know from manufacturing processes, and anyone with more factual knowledge can feel free to correct these numbers):
Selling 8,000 at 800$ = $6,400,000
Taking a guess of a year of development cost what? I'll take a guess at $500,000 for the salaries of 2 or 3 engineers or such and another $1,000,000 to get the mold and processing structure ready, then the materials and workforce salaries... that's a 5 Million profit.
Once the molds are ready and the manufacturing process is going, the overhead shrinks quite a lot and they could easily produce 5x the numbers at even 300$ and still make a huge profit, have more happy fans/collectors, and be able to bring maybe new ones in, so the next items would sell even more.
Example again: produce 40,000 at 300$ = $12,000,000
Using the same guessed estimated costs:
$500,000 for the salaries of 2 or 3 engineers or such and another $1,500,000 to get the mold and processing structure ready plus the extra materials and workforce salaries... that's a 10 Million profit.
But anyways.. it comes down that some things are just too expensive and it sucks that so many try to see how far they can push the prices up.
