pluv wrote:
Doctor Robert Strange wrote:
Gaigaan-Dnok wrote:
If it were a matter of not knowing what will sell well, why not just take pre-orders? They've done them before...
The more I read the "There's absolutely NO WAY to know what's going to sell" argument, the less water it holds. There are a lot of ways to gauge interest before rolling them out.
Just seems like a lack of imagination, honestly, to say there's no other way.
Puzzling mis-step for a company usually on their game. Star quarterback's trying to take the field with a basketball
Blind bags sell really well in the toy world. This is something Lego, Imaginext, and Playmobil are already doing very successfully. And those are just the similar body type plus accessories ones that come to mind, never mind every single other blind bagged toy out there. What you see as a mis-step, may be more of you not seeing the whole field.
I don't know, I come at it from the customizing and baseball card world where you resort to buying, selling, and trading to get stuff you want. There are no chase kits to worry about, so like that would be the way to go if you want to remove the chance factor.
Never doubted the cash grab.
It's not a financial mis-step, per se. Any dummy can walk through Toys R Us and see that blind bags are the hot trend. LEGO, Playmobil, Mattel, Hasbro-- they all do it. These kits could financially ensure that we see a lot more cool original stuff without waiting on whole new lines. That's not lost on me.
I'm well-versed in blind bags, since they're a pretty cheap way to pick up Megabloks fodder, and, overall, I have a negative opinion of them. Growing up with "What You See Is What You Get," I don't really see the appeal with lines I seriously collect for my collection.
For the stuff I really want, I end up resorting to eBay. I mean, cool if you're a scalper or 3rd party reseller capitolizing off something not meant for them, but for me as a customizer? Hard sell.
More than maybe a lot of customizers working here, I'm already using blind bags as my source for custom fodder. Sometimes it's all I grab. Any time I've gone for specific parts/figures, I'm let down. The random figures I do get usually rot in my fodder bin for years.
Bossfight still wins because I'm going to track down the kits I want, since those sculpts are ridiculously dope... with whatever's left over after I buy Diaclones...