>>7453725This.
As someone who makes a living making things, I understand that sometimes you decide to make something new and ambitious that you can't quite guarantee will be popular enough to justify it's creation - combine this with the corporate bookkeepers and pennypinchers who never want to lose a single dime if it can be helped, I can completely see why crowdfunding such a huge toy would be the only way it would make reasonable sense for Hasbro to make such a thing - it's one thing to just poll the fans and hope retailers are cool with being able to only stock one of these at a time in the hopes such a ridiculous project makes the money sunk into it back, it's another thing to ask fans to put up or shut up and essentially just get real-money preorders from everybody to make sure the project is worthwhile before starting up the engineering machine to produce this thing.
Folks are always all "THIS GIANT COMPANY IS BIG ENOUGH TO TAKE THE RISK THEMSELVES" without understanding that a company doesn't get to be that big (or STAY that big) if they aren't smart about offloading potential risks whenever possible.
