>>10112815Yeah?
So instead of selling a 500k to over a million units like Hasbro or McFarlane, companies like Bandai and DCC are only expecting to sell 10-100k.
It's not a lot on the more popular line/figure, but the price gap can still be very wide.
Companies like McFarlane and Bandai both release mass market (500k-1m+) and collector toys (10k-100k). So we've directly seen that if McFarlane releases a mass market toy in the collectors market, it only costs $5 more. This matches up with how DCC, Diamond, and NECA releases also used to cost $5 (before covid) more, despite having higher QC, more paint, etc than mass market toys. And this is when they're selling far fewer toys too.
So we saw the true costs of a toys, at least from the consumer perspective.
Obviously, corona and economic downturns hit hard in the past 3 years, which has led to costs increasing by $10-15 for collector figures. Inflation. Fuel. Materials. Factory shut downs. Dock shut downs. Borders closing. War. Container Ships idling. Container ships getting stuck. Dock queues.
The only thing keeping prices down for the majority of mass market toys (except for Hasbro, but we've seen the negative effect their price hike had) is competition, while collector companies can't afford keeping costs down, hence raising their prices month after month.
Obviously part 2, imports cost much much more than western toys because Japan has been ripping off their collector/otaku fanbase since the 80s, where they charged $80 for 2 episodes of anime (whereas in the US anime prices went from 3 episoes for $30, to $25 for 5 episdes, and eventually led to $20-50 for entire series) They brought those insane rip off prices to their collector toys, hence costing $60-100 for the equivalent of a $30 figure.
