>>7596115Hellboy isn't as niche as you believe.
Its release was planned to coincide with a large budget movie (about equal to Deadpool). It had couple of animated movies, which got re-released a couple of times, including BD and 4k release, and a couple of toylines.
As a brand, it's definitely not niche.
Whereas Mazinger is popular... where? Asia? It's definitely no Dragonball Z Kai (broly movie made over $30 million in the us vs Mazinger's $220k) It's a relatively small market compared to the US... for pretty much every industry. With toys, its $25 billion per year vs 5 billion for Japan. So despite low comic sales, the comic book characters themselves are worth bundles, hence companies like Toy Biz, McFarlane, DCC, and Dark Horse Direct taking an active approach toward making toys of their own properties.
Marvel took it a step further, by just farming out its licenses and moving into the movie industry for the largest mass market profits.
Anyway, as that other guy has mentioned, Sentinel/1000 Toys has been growing out and like other companies who have picked up the Halo license, there's still SOME beliefs that Halo is a worthwhile investment for big bucks returns.
If they were purposely doing their own designs, which Squaresoft definitely was not since they didn't spin it off with its own title like their Variants line, it would have some special name like AMAZING Yamaguchi... or VARIANTS. See also Sentinel's own "Re:Edits" line. Just naming the sculptor/designer is no different than Hasbro announcing that Gentle Giant was doing their Star Wars Black series when it was first announced and i should note that Gentle Giant sculptors had been hired by Hasbro and even Toy Biz for various toys years before. So its purely for high profile credit.
>These are not toys made for such distribution anyways no normal person pays over 30 bucks for a toy.You mean like Mezco, Dark Horse, DCC, or Mondo? They've all released $30+ figures, including 1000toy's $110 Hellboy.
