![sick :sick:](./images/smilies/sick.gif)
BW Megs, he breaks.
Would he have more parts than, say, Movie Barricade or Bumblebee though? Those are 2/3s the price. I think they're simply increasing the price incrementally until they find the limit of diminishing returns on the scale of units sold versus MSRP. Sunstreaker is equivalent in size and accessories and was about $120 USD, yeah?Warcry wrote: ↑Mon Jun 10, 2019 2:04 am Thats close to triple what I paid for most of the Takara MP cars back when I was ordering them, for sure. Of course, there's also a good chance he's got close to three times as many moving parts as Sideswipe or Prowl or Wheeljack, in the name of cartoon accuracy in robot mode...
Agreed. I wonder where the balance is between super expensive, ultra niche third party stuff and Masterpiece which, at the end of the day, is a product line meant for general retail*. Seems like Takara are trying for the price of the former with the market of the latter. Or rather, their prices are actually higher than some third party equivalents.I'm honestly surprised there's still a market for these things at this price. Especially in Japan where high-end expensive merch is usually protagonist-focussed. They're nice and all, but...I could buy an entire team of X-Men for that price. I don't think they're THAT nice.
Oh, I can't disagree with that at all. The price increase is partly eaten up by increasing complexity but I'm sure a lot of it is just pure profit. After all, aren't they now charging almost double for their "it's cartoon accurate because there's less paint!" redecos of Sideswipe, Prowl and Red Alert than what the originals went for five or six years ago? But as long as people are willing to pay the extra money and pretend that the quality has gone up a commensurate amount...Clay wrote: ↑Mon Jun 10, 2019 7:32 pm Would he have more parts than, say, Movie Barricade or Bumblebee though? Those are 2/3s the price. I think they're simply increasing the price incrementally until they find the limit of diminishing returns on the scale of units sold versus MSRP. Sunstreaker is equivalent in size and accessories and was about $120 USD, yeah?
I'm in a similar boat. My last MP car was either Exhaust or Blue Bluestreak, whichever came later, and shortly after that the declining looks and increasing prices put them firmly outside what I was comfortable buying. And as much as I'd love to be more positive about the Beast Wars stuff, the prices keep going up and every figure so far has had pretty serious QC issues. They're nice to look at, but they're positioning these things as premium, top-end collectibles when I really don't think the actual product justifies that.
I'd lean in the opposite direction, actually. It seems like they're trying to squeeze every cent they can out of Masterpiece because it's the only Transformers property that's still a going concern for them. The rest of their in-house lines have been reduced to slapping Japanese-language stickers onto Hasbro boxes, aside from the occasional weird one-off.