TFARCHIVE FORUMS

Meh. It doesn't look like Lio Convoy to me, it barely looks like a convoy.

The inevitable Monstructor recolor of Fansproject Dinoking is finally coming out.

No idea about the shells.

I thought these came out years ago! Or am I thinking of a different Monstructor?

Warcry wrote:I thought these came out years ago! Or am I thinking of a different Monstructor?

Dinoking version came first.

Did they even finish the shells for the Dinoking version? I'd heard at the time that that was a concern.

Yeah, they made the full set. The shells are more expensive than the robots, though.

Being FP could be a while longer than June. Defo interested if I can justify it on release, although TBH what I really want is a good updated Slog shell. Already got the Dinoking equivalent of the inner robot.

That didn't take long...

Add-on kit for Studio Series Grimlock.

Two hands! Bendy tail! Flail and maul! If they get the colors right, should be a nice set.

Sooooooooo maaaaaany third party toys in the pipeline...

The nemesis Seacons actually look pretty nice in those colors.

I just can't fathom how there's a big enough market for this much product. A couple years ago I thought for sure the market was over-saturated and we would have seen a contraction by now, but it just keeps growing. There's a million awesome things in there and it's awesome to see that much product but I don't know how people even keep track of it all.

I love that we're sloooowly starting to see some more 3P Beast Wars stuff.

Can only assume it's mostly for domestic (Chinese) markets.

A lot of it seems to have gone very cartoon-oriented. Great to see the ingenuity of designs, love big slide decks like this, but I think the thing I like most out of that lot is New Age Gremlin (Goldbug) and having the gold MP Bee with a Renderform head plus the larger TW (?) OS KO for a different scale display ticks things fairly well.

Will probably make that the thing I look for at TFN. Pre-orders or deposits are in on the smattering of other specific items that this year's likely to see released.

Yeah, the hobby in Western Europe and in the USA has reached its maximal level, but Japanese otaku never get enough of anything, and China's starting to have a sizeable middle class... That happens to encompass many nerds who started to have disposable income.
And even if 0.01% of the Chinese people are interested in Transformer toys, it still means that there's a market with 150 000 potential customers. So, yeah, these things sell like hot cakes, mostly to Asians.

SQQQQQQUUUUUUEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEE

Maketoys are reissuing their Guardia/Defensor set later this year!

/SQQQQQQQQQQUUUUUUUUEEEEEEEEEEEE

New third-party ROTF Devastator and I'm already fawning.

Apparently it's supposed to be about 50cm/20inches fully combined. Looks like Mixmaster's cab turns inside-out to make Devastator's head, which is accurate. Can't even begin to imagine how it works.

Unique Toys have showed an early prototype of AoE Galvatron

That's not a transformer. That's some kind of sorcery or voodoo.

https://www.seibertron.com/transformers ... ple/45048/

Seems like Wei Jiang versions of Hasbro stuff are about to dry up.

From what I read, Wei Jiang also own a whole bunch of different sub-brands too. The only one that I'd heard of was KBB, it does sound like a whole corner of the third-party marketplace might dry up over this. Though really, the Chinese justice system is so capricious I can't guess whether they're going to let the management they arrested out after a hefty bribe so that they can restart the business under a different banner, or whether they're goig to make an example out of them and throw them in prison for two decades.

That doesn't surprise me. After Lego's victory over Lepin, I wondered if it would make IP holders a bit more strident about tackling Chinese bootleggers. These are direct copies of Hasbro products, after all. On top of that, I do wonder if we're starting to see a shift in the mood towards China. Countries want to do business with them, but this kind of relentless bootlegging and it's internment of dissenters and muslims, not to mention the ongoing crisis in Hong Kong are difficult to ignore. Shame they make everything in the world now. If only they were like Russia, and just dicked about in misinformation and political sabotage for their own ends. Everyone would be fine with that.

I really doubt it's about the third party market as a whole, but rather specifically because Wei Jiang are bootlegging actual Hasbro/Takara designs. My impression has been that third party figures that are original molds are in the clear for the same reason Hasbro can alter existing car designs and not have to pay licensing fees, which is to say that three-dimensional designs need only have slight tweaks to get around copyright (or patent?) apparently. In Wei Jiang's case, they're not doing that since they're making size-shifted copies of Hasbro figures with maybe 5% of figure changed.

I remember a different third-party crackdown a few years ago that dealt with chinese companies making bootlegs of G1 figures. In the end it wasn't even just that the figure was bootlegged, but that they copied the packaging with all the artwork, trademarked phrases, and everything, and that's what made them especially vulnerable. Not sure how Wei Jiang was packaging these, which could have influenced the decision as well.

I mean, yeah, the third party stuff is a big legal gray area, but it's a gray area that Hasbro takes full advantage of as well. Just so long as these outfits are designing their figures from scratch and calling them weird names, I think they're in the clear. That seems to bear out in both what's been allowed and what's been stopped.

Warcry wrote: ↑Sat Jul 25, 2020 3:21 pm From what I read, Wei Jiang also own a whole bunch of different sub-brands too. The only one that I'd heard of was KBB, it does sound like a whole corner of the third-party marketplace might dry up over this.

From the ebay listing I ordered my 19cm Hulkie knockoff from, the sub-brands are JinBao, JinJiang, NBK, HaiZhiXing, YueXing, Wei Jiang, and BaoHeXing. Can't say that I've heard of any besides Wei Jiang and NBK, or that that's a complete list.

KOs and low budget 3P transforming robots in general seem to be doing fine;

https://www.facebook.com/pg/sirtoys/pho ... n__=-UCH-R