There's buzzing online about a new five-pack that's going to be a Hasbro Selects release (so likely exclusive to Hasbro Pulse):

https://news.tfw2005.com/2024/01/06/new-selects-autobot-multipack-listing-found-deluxe-hound-jazz-wheeljack-sunstreaker-trailbreaker-501628

As you can see from the link, it includes Hound (the Earth mode toy, in all probability) as well as Jazz, Sunstreaker, Trailbreaker, and Wheeljack. It's reportedly going to retail for around $110 USD.

The set is purported to give "battle damage" to at least some of these characters, so fans are speculating that there could be Siege-style weathering, or maybe they're all going to have more Sunbow-accurate color schemes, or maybe even they're all dead versions of characters from The Transformers: the Movie (note that only Wheeljack got a death scene in the film proper, and while Trailbreaker and Hound just up and disappeared, Jazz definitely didn't die).

Not many people are happy about having to buy four toys they already own just to get Earth-mode Hound, but I expect people will be parting them out on eBay in the near future, just like they were doing with the troop builder four-packs, just to get the toys they actually want.

Zob (Hound is gonna be the new Cosmos, I suspect)

Jazz and Wheeljack have not been particularly hard to find, especially with Wheeljack's package refresh, but Trailbreaker and especially Sunstreaker seem to have slipped through the fingers of many a fan. Hound is, of course, the grail. All in all, it seems like a decent deal for the regular fan, less so for the dedicated collector who is being asked to double dip.

Zobovor wrote:

> There's buzzing online about a new five-pack that's going to be a Hasbro Selects release (so likely exclusive to Hasbro Pulse):

> https://news.tfw2005.com/2024/01/06/new-selects-autobot-multipack-listing-found-deluxe-hound-jazz-wheeljack-sunstreaker-trailbreaker-501628

> As you can see from the link, it includes Hound (the Earth mode toy, in all probability) as well as Jazz, Sunstreaker, Trailbreaker, and Wheeljack. It's reportedly going to retail for around $110 USD.

I predict the Japanese release of Hound will be a hot seller for BBTS and the like, if there is a single figure option.

> The set is purported to give "battle damage" to at least some of these characters, so fans are speculating that there could be Siege-style weathering, or maybe they're all going to have more Sunbow-accurate color schemes, or maybe even they're all dead versions of characters from The Transformers: the Movie (note that only Wheeljack got a death scene in the film proper, and while Trailbreaker and Hound just up and disappeared, Jazz definitely didn't die).

Perhaps the palettes of toys were crushed during transport, and so every set will have its own unique battle damage.

> Not many people are happy about having to buy four toys they already own just to get Earth-mode Hound, but I expect people will be parting them out on eBay in the near future, just like they were doing with the troop builder four-packs, just to get the toys they actually want.

I don't think Hasbro wants people to have a complete collection of anything.

That sounds absurd, but they really never put a priority on being collector friendly (Bumblebee and Earthmode Soundwave being Netflix exclusives, Golden Disk Terrorsaur, Cosmos, Seekers, etc) and this is actually a little bit collector-hostile. And then you have things like each Insecticon having a slightly different purple, just different enough to be noticeable, or Earthspark's main cast not all being offered at the same level.

I'm not suggesting that they are deliberately trying to foil collectors, just that it isn't a significant priority, or a priority at all.

I think someone is being measured by the "wrong" metrics -- something along the lines of whether they can place a toy with a retailer, rather than whether they are maximizing sales.

We regularly see toys selling out almost immediately, and we can usually predict which ones it will be, because we know the franchise. Presumably, there are people at Hasbro that are also passionate about the Transformers and can do this calculations as well. If you sell X units of Starscream, there should basically be a formula for the rest of the seekers at this point. And if they cannot get that many into the grubby little hands of consumers, they are just throwing away opportunities for sales.
The retailer might be a bit shy about putting in an order large enough, because they don't know the brand and they cannot estimate the risk. That makes me wonder if Hasbro can/should take on a bit of that risk -- structure contracts to guarantee minimum sales, or buy back unsold product.

Hasbro has been doing poorly lately (and if Baldur's Gate 3 wasn't a huge success, they would be doing a lot worse). We've also been having large distribution problems -- if that is happening across their brands, they really need to change something fundamentally.

Perhaps they could secretly overproduce certain toys and have 30,000 fake scalpers on eBay...

(Counter argument: has BBTS ever finished selling off those Battle Unicorns they got Hasbro to do another run of?)

> Zob (Hound is gonna be the new Cosmos, I suspect)

This is why collecting has become a lot less fun.

On Tuesday, January 9, 2024 at 3:50:11 AM UTC-7, GustavoWombat wrote:

> I'm not suggesting that they are deliberately trying to foil collectors, just that it isn't a significant priority, or a priority at all.

I can see it from both sides. I think the character selection has, historically, demonstrated a real focus on catering to longtime fans. In recent years we've gotten so many great toys, and they've ventured outside their "safe zone" (1984-85) to give us amazing updates for characters from The Transformers: the Movie and Beast Wars. I've been happy with the toys in a way that I really wasn't about 20 years ago. (Looking back, I see now that Armada wasn't meant for me at all, but rather was an attempt to create a new generation of fans.)

But, you're dead right that it's frustrating when they make significant characters like Soundwave or Cosmos or Terrorsaur hard to find. I think that if the retailer-exclusive toys were nobody characters that no one wanted, then they would underperform and Amazon or Walmart or whoever would be less likely to order exclusives in the future. So, I'm sure it's a balancing act. Netflix Bumblebee is arguably essential to a neo-G1 collection, but Mutant Tigatron or Puffer (was that his name?) is arguably not.

With regards to Hound, specifically, it feels like a huge mistake to put him in a multipack with a bunch of toys that a lot of people already own. Sure, Sunstreaker and Trailbreaker were comparatively scarce, and some people probably never found them. I think I saw them at retail maybe one time, at most. But, that's why they should do a package refresh on characters when there's a demand for it. (Besides, isn't Sunstreaker getting a Studio Series '86 toy this year? If it's a new mold, that will render the Earthrise toy largely obsolete.)

He could have been just a regular release—a toy where we went, "good, glad they're finally doing him" and bought him like he was just another standard release. But to put him in a $100+ gift set, when Hasbro *knows* he's one of the few remaining characters necessary to complete the Ark crew, that's just dirty pool. Collector-hostile is a good term to describe what's happening here, yes.

> I think someone is being measured by the "wrong" metrics -- something along the lines of whether they can place a toy with a retailer, rather than whether they are maximizing sales.

I used to think that the only reason stores ended up with retailer exclusives was because, say, Target didn't want to carry it in stores and Walmart didn't have the shelf space for it, so it basically became a Toys "R" Us exclusive by default because nobody else was interested in selling it. Now I think the opposite is true—that retailers are actively seeking out exclusive items, and they're soliciting Hasbro to produce product specifically for them, and no one else.

So, I imagine Hasbro is looking at a given year's product from two different angles—these are the 20 or so characters they want to address this year, but also, let's spread them among the exclusives, just so Amazon doesn't end up with all the good characters and then the Walgreens exclusive is total garbage. I suspect some product is being created specifically to make it an exclusive for somebody (like the Golden Disk toys) but I imagine some planned product is also being saved for specific retailers, just so Hasbro has something to offer them.
> We regularly see toys selling out almost immediately, and we can usually predict which ones it will be, because we know the franchise. Presumably, there are people at Hasbro that are also passionate about the Transformers and can do this calculations as well. If you sell X units of Starscream, there should basically be a formula for the rest of the seekers at this point. And if they cannot get that many into the grubby little hands of consumers, they are just throwing away opportunities for sales.

I'm sure it's hard to strike a balance. During Earthrise, they made Starscream widely available at retail, but the other five were exclusives. So, they succeeded in not making Earthrise feel samey, and we didn't complain about redeco fatigue like we did during Combiner Wars, but it also made any jet who was Not Starscream really hard to find. They were so scarce that Hasbro was forced to do a package refresh for Dirge (and, eventually, Ramjet, and probably the others too some day) just so fans can get another crack at them.

Obviously, the ultimate goal is for Hasbro to produce exactly enough toys so that everybody who gets one can have one, but without producing so many that they languish in the clearance aisles. But, sometimes I'm sure they leave potential sales on the table because they don't want to overproduce. I would say that, from a business standpoint, it's always better to leave consumers hungry for more, if the alternative is for their brand to appear as if it's not performing well due to unwanted toys clogging up the action figure aisle.
> The retailer might be a bit shy about putting in an order large enough, because they don't know the brand and they cannot estimate the risk. That makes me wonder if Hasbro can/should take on a bit of that risk -- structure contracts to guarantee minimum sales, or buy back unsold product.

I know there are some situations when manufacturers reclaim unsold product from the retail stores. Mattel scooped up a bunch of old wrestling figures recently so that they could get new product on the shelves instead of the same old ones that have been languishing for a few years now. Hasbro did a buyback on unsold Phantom Menace figures from 1999 at one point. But, it's comparatively rare. Most of the time, the unspoken rule is that once a retailer owns the product, it's up to them to either sell it at full price, or if it's a dog item, mark it down to clearance prices and get rid of it.

> This is why collecting has become a lot less fun.

I order around 90% of my toys online these days, so collecting is largely automated for me now. As long as I remember to put in the pre-orders, the toys just show up on my doorstep when they're supposed to. I see people (mainly on Reddit) complaining about how they still don't have Beachcomber or Bombshell or whoever, because they never saw them at retail, and I want to say... you're *still* expecting toys to show up at retail? Really? Seriously? I don't even play that game any longer. I think the last time I couldn't find a toy I wanted was during Siege, but that was, if I remember right, before Hasbro Pulse was a thing.

But, honestly, the literal collecting part of collecting was *never* fun for me. Driving to three or four or seven different stores in a weekend, wasting gas, and coming up empty-handed...? No thank you. Even having worked retail most of my adult life, it's been a challenge sometimes to find the toys I want. More and more, it seems like stores, especially lately, just don't get stuff in a timely manner. I used to say crazy things like, "Instead of trying to hunt down toys, why can't Hasbro just send them to me?" while knowing that it was a completely nutty concept that would never really happen. And yet, here we are.

Zob (and when I say toy shopping is less expensive than therapy... you have no idea how true that actually is)

On 1/10/2024 7:38 PM, Zobovor wrote:
> I see people (mainly on Reddit) complaining about how they still don't have Beachcomber or Bombshell or whoever

I preordered him on BBTS and never got him. He's listed as "Estimated
Arrival: 1st Quarter 2024". Who knows if that will happen or not. But
something weird absolutely happened with Beachcomber.

Zobovor wrote:

> I order around 90% of my toys online these days, so collecting is largely automated for me now. As long as I remember to put in the pre-orders, the toys just show up on my doorstep when they're supposed to. I see people (mainly on Reddit) complaining about how they still don't have Beachcomber or Bombshell or whoever, because they never saw them at retail, and I want to say... you're *still* expecting toys to show up at retail? Really? Seriously? I don't even play that game any longer. I think the last time I couldn't find a toy I wanted was during Siege, but that was, if I remember right, before Hasbro Pulse was a thing.

I think the current product is too hit or miss to just preorder everything I might want. I want to see a few people review them and walk through the transformation before I commit. They're expensive, and they take up a lot of space and I have a problem getting rid of things.

A lot of the toys look good in robot mode, but have problems either with the vehicle mode, or the transformation, or parts fall off.

And, for a lot of adult collectors, that's fine. They pose the toys in robot mode on a shelf, and bask in the knowledge that Mudflap is looking down on them.

But I still play like a child -- maybe not to the point of making little noises, but not that far off. I'm not smacking them against each other in a sand box, but I am compulsively transforming them while listening to music or a podcast with a cat on my feet, pondering how Cybertron Hot Shot from the Siege Hound mold would fit in with whatever other toys are out, and instead of using his toy to hammer on Earthrise Optimus Prime, I'm sketching out the outline of a fanfic where his character flaws would lead to disaster if he was on a guest episode of the G1 cartoon. And then never get around to writing it. But the compulsive transformation, and the rolling the toy around... still very kidlike in a way that a lot of the current toys don't work well.

> Zob (and when I say toy shopping is less expensive than therapy... you have no idea how true that actually is)

Hands on medical work is expensive. The copay for my PT is about $40 (we will see what the new year brings), so that's about a Voyager, but the shrink was always more than that.

On Thursday, January 11, 2024 at 3:05:13 AM UTC-7, GustavoWombat wrote:

> I think the current product is too hit or miss to just preorder everything I might want. I want to see a few people review them and walk through the transformation before I commit. They're expensive, and they take up a lot of space and I have a problem getting rid of things.

I mean, if you bought a toy and completely hated it, you could always resell it and make back a percentage of what you paid for it. But, that takes effort, and I will freely admit that I'm sitting on many hundreds of dollars' worth of things that I don't needor want, but I haven't sold because I'm incredibly lazy.

Me, I'm at a point where I'm checking names off a list. When United Gears comes out, even if it's a wholly unsatisfying update that doesn't look the way I want it to look, I'll still buy it, because it's still Gears, and I still need him for my collection. Even if it's just the Studio Series Brawn toy in red and blue, I'll buy the damn thing.

With that said, I'm anticipating that Gears will actually be really good. I'm guessing they'll tuck his front wheels into his robot chest somewhere, so they will effectively disappear for transformation. I envision him with black fists. He probably comes with a little pistol. I'm guessing they won't find a way to make the wheels on his legs disappear, but that won't be a tragedy.

And then Windcharger will be the very last member of the Ark crew they haven't done as a modern Siege-era toy, and he'll be all anybody talks about. He and Buzzsaw are the only 1984 characters left to do! And, also, I'm weirdly excited to see Brawn and Gears and the inevitable Windcharger be offered a second time as Outback and Swerve and Tailgate. I don't know what it is about those 1986 Mini Autobots I love so much. They all have serious mental problems. They're adorable.

I'm really surprised pictures of United wave two haven't leaked yet. You'd think this would be about the right time for it.

Zob (looking around the den and wondering how many more Detolf cabinets I can reasonably expect to set up down here)