Haslab War For Cybertron Unicron Transformation Video

lordsmurf

I fail to see how a plastic mass-produced toy is a premium product.
Put loads of diecast/metal into it, hand-painted details, take fan feedback on design flaws prior to production, then maybe we can consider it a premium item.

That's redefining premium to the point of uselessness.

With respect to our hobby here, yes, it is a Premium product. Strictly speaking, this is a CHUG product. It's labeled as WFC Unicron. It's detailing is done in the WFC style. But there is no compromises in its design and engineering. Hasbro designed a zero compromise CHUG piece, and set a price for that.

Now look at the Titans we've gotten. Great products? Absolutely. But they're covered top to bottom in compromises. Metroplex is largely hollow, only had one gun, a cheap Scamper and no Sixgun . Fortress Maximus reuses Metroplex parts, lacked his little minions, and while cool looking had a compromised design. Trypticon is largely unpainted and features a mass-market-economical leg and tail joint system that had a crucial design flaw. Those are high level and mass market, but ultimately not premium products.

If WFC Unicron were not premium, he would be:
(1) Released at retail.
(2) Titan class, even if on the larger size. He would top out at no more than 7 lbs.
(3) Largely done in just colored plastic, not painted like the Haslab unicron is
(4) He would have a fraction of the parts count, and likely not transform into a full sphere.

Basically, imagine a larger version of the Supreme mold, just more hollow, no electronics and a different method for transforming the hemispheres rather than the wings. That is what a non-premium product looked like.

Very simply, I don't know how you can define a fully painted, 20 lb, 36 inch transformer that is essentially a made-to-order product, released only in an exclusive window, as anything but premium.

Or let me pose this a different way. Masterpiece Transformers are by definition a premium product. If this figure eliminated almost all the surface details, was deco'd in the style of the recent Masterpiece releases, and released as "MP-50 Unicron", would you call it a premium product? Most would. I certainly would. Because one of the most important aspects of "Premium" (and the price that goes with it) is the target audience.

These other aspects you describe – diecast, hand painted details… that wouldn't make it intrinsically premium. The Walmart G1 re-releases have diecast. They are considered premium because they are re-issues of classic figures, targeted torwards collectors, and therefore sold at a premium price. But their original releases in 1984 and 1985 were mass market, and die cast was normal then. There was nothing premium about them.

Consider the iPhone. The iPhones are broadly considered technologically inferior to Samsung Galaxy and Notes. They're made of much of the same materials. The Galaxy just does a lot of things the iPhone does better. But though Galaxy has made strides in upping its quality, it is not considered a premium product the way an iPhone is. Apple doesn't market the iPhone as the phone for the everyman. It's a special product, meant for those who want to be included in an elite circle of belonging. the Iphone XS may be inferior to comparable Galaxy, but the fact it is an iPhone XS, a status symbol, whose intent is to be for a certain customer, Apple charges a premium. For the everyman, they have the XR, or maybe even the Iphone 8, at a more affordable price. And keep in mind, the XR and XS were largely the same aside from the screen and casing.

Unicron isn't being made for everybody. It's being made for the "elite collector". It is being made for adults, not kids. And no expense is being spared. That makes it a premium product by definition.

Pfft hahaha

lordsmurf

Sometimes liking posts is not enough. Spot on.  

I do, however, think a lot of posters put too much emphasis on injection molding costs. Yes, it costs money. But most of that $4.7M figures isn't for that. As you state, a fraction. There's way to cut corners, cut costs here as well. And lets not forget, it'll be using foreign labor, not domestic. I really would not be surprise if 50%+ of that was just profit, because Hasbro wants guaranteed ROI. This isn't an NPO, not fan service.

Pffft. What market research? They've really not done jack sh!t on this front. The marketing efforts have been worse than what I've seen in college marketing course projects.

I agree that the marketing research failed. Their YouTube video promo was an exact example of this and not even providing the details of what the bonuses were offered. If they added the backers from other countries and showed how close this project is to completion, it would certainly motivate people to join in for those that can go for it.

I’m thinking it’s only premium in weight, size and price. Doesn’t guarantee that the QC will be spot on

StrifeZ

This always happens with premium products, no matter the type or format or setting. There are always some folks who don't think that a premium product should exist or should cost that much or whatever. Sometimes it's a matter of princple. Sometimes it's because they can't afford it or don't want to pay it. The MP-44 thread is basically the same thing – folks objecting to the $450 Optimus Prime (though it's $313 if you got it through Amazon.co.jp), because they think the $450 Optimus prime is ridiculous, a bad precedent, unfair or w/e.

It's always pointless. Like I didn't get how, of all Star Wars vehicles that could possibly be made for Haslab, the Sail Barge was somehow highly prized. If it were me, I would have wanted like… Echo Base. Or the Star Destroyer to end all Star Destroyers. Not… Jabba's sail barge. But who was I to go out of my way crap on the idea of people who wanted it? If it makes people happy good for them. It certainly looks cool.

People just… waste their time trying to make other folk unhappy. There are other productive things to do.

Not that the Bayverse movies are sources of wisdom, but this guy said something smart:

It's a choice. It's an intensely personal decision. So much negativity… Who wants to live a life filled with hate?

That's actually like, really well put.

The TF fandom is spoiled. We feel entitled to pay little for a figure with decent transformation, nicely painted, and articulation. While fans of other franchise are just happy to pay premium price for a premium statue.

foobot333

A part of me wants to believe that all these pissing fights on the TFW forums are being directed by Michael Bay.

Or maybe pissing on Bay.  

Sammael

Any designers working on Unicron are not working on something else. I doubt HasTak has dedicated R&D people who just work on proofs of concept and such; more likely, they were just normal design staff pulled aside for this. So, salaries aside, the cost of their involvement is also having to reduce the number of other things in the design pipeline or having to hire new designers to replace them. And all this is worth a lot more than $20K. My salary may not be high, but I commonly contribute a significant % to projects that my company charges upward of $200K to customers. So, when I have to do something else, they have to reduce the number of such projects.

That's really not how it works. If you have to think of it as "I had to take him away from this other task", then that means you don't have enough employees, and really nothing more.

MnemonicSyntax

Yeah, that I can agree with.

BTW, something else I just thought of, about the the horrible marketing.

– A company should tell you what you're getting, buying, what, how, why, who, etc. Done. You then make a decision to buy, or not buy.
– But we're having to ask everything, glean whatever small tidbit of info we're given, and having to speculate based on these scraps of data. We're being told damned-near-nothing, shown a few pretty photos, show some sloppy prototypes in action, and that's it. "Please pay us $625, thank you, come again!"

WTF?  

A part of me wants to believe that all these pissing fights on the TFW forums are being directed by Michael Bay. Kind of entertaining, not really, actually pretty terrible dialogue… but hey there's a transformer in the middle of the story so it's okay!

lordsmurf

Again, WTF?  

I'm here because I don't know if I want this. After posting for weeks, I finally decided to NOT do it last week, and wrote my reasons why. A big reason was space. Other reasons, but space was the biggie. Well, I may have space after all. So, to quote myself, "fuck". Not any easy decision.
– If I don't do it, I may regret it.
– If I do it, I may regret it.

While here, while we're all using each other as a sounding board on why to (or not to) buy, and while some shared why they've already bought, I have been correcting some of what I know to be nonsense, sometimes just off/inaccurate, based on my professional backgrounds, on aspects that have some overlap in this very topic. You apparently have disagreements with facts, not me.

You think this thread is market research? Really?! Pffft. That's really funny. No.  

Ya know, at this point you aren’t even worth paying attention to, have a nice life

lordsmurf

Sometimes liking posts is not enough. Spot on.  

I do, however, think a lot of posters put too much emphasis on injection molding costs. Yes, it costs money. But most of that $4.7M figures isn't for that. As you state, a fraction. There's way to cut corners, cut costs here as well. And lets not forget, it'll be using foreign labor, not domestic. I really would not be surprise if 50%+ of that was just profit, because Hasbro wants guaranteed ROI. This isn't an NPO, not fan service.

Pffft. What market research? They've really not done jack sh!t on this front. The marketing efforts have been worse than what I've seen in college marketing course projects.

honestly, you're nothing but rhetoric and agenda. you constantly come up with inane conspiracy theories. the market research would essentially be how much the hardcore collector is willing to pay for a percieved value. this thread in and of itself is an excercise in market research that hasbro doesn't actually have to pay for, we are giving it to them for free. how many people have said that at this price it should have voice clips or leds? how many people have said this or that about it? if the right people are reading this thread then the entire this is market research, along with everything else about it online. you keep talking about how hasbro is so cheap and always looking to cut corners, why pay someone to perform market research or even marketing in general when an online community of nerds and collectors will do all of that for them for free?

lordsmurf

Sometimes liking posts is not enough. Spot on.  

I do, however, think a lot of posters put too much emphasis on injection molding costs. Yes, it costs money. But most of that $4.7M figures isn't for that. As you state, a fraction. There's way to cut corners, cut costs here as well. And lets not forget, it'll be using foreign labor, not domestic. I really would not be surprise if 50%+ of that was just profit, because Hasbro wants guaranteed ROI. This isn't an NPO, not fan service.

For me, the mold costs represent less why they need exactly how much they do and just a barrier as to why they can't produce much less than they are currently without it being worthwhile. I remember reading the idea of a 500 piece limited run, but to me the sort of "flat rate" cost of making this thing makes much smaller runs very difficult.

Correct me if I'm wrong, I think we estimated based on Metroplex that about $200,000-$500,000 would go into molds for this toy.

StrifeZ

Again, they also probably invested basically nothing in this. They've had employees work on it for 18 months or so as part of their job. They made some low quality proof of concept prototypes from a 3D printer (that mostly featureless but transformable Unicron). They engineered it on a computer and produced a high quality 3d printed prototype with all that surface detail and the parts as they'd actually be in the final version. This high quality 3d printed prototype was hand painted and hand assembled.

We know all the above because I am describing the process they illustrated in the video for the sail barge before it went into production.

The next step is where things get expensive. They'll have to make tens of molds for injection molding by buying steel blocks and having the negative of every part carved into them. They'll also have to stand up the supplier logistics base for all the screws, pins, fasteners and whatever else goes into Unicron. Unlike the main line figures, there will not be much if any recycling of these things from other parts of the line.

In the future when 3d printers are better… yeah, we'd probably get Unicron faster. But as it stands now, 3d printing doesn't hold a candle to injection molding, which means it is actually going to take the year and a half to get all the aspects of actually making this thing together.

I think to date, employee pay aside, they've spent probably less than $20,000 on Unicron. And most of that would just be in raw materials for making their prototypes. But what comes next is very pricey, which is why they are asking for the $4.6 million up front, rather than charging on delivery. Because they want to assume no risk for this massive item. Some fraction of that $4.6 million will go into the molds, the logistics and everything involved in mass producing this thing. But if Unicron fails, then they've spent basically no money, so have no risk or liability to it.

and ultimately what they have spent, should this fail, can be chalked up to market research, which in and of itself is valuable