>>10628153>You seriously think that merch being produced at various factories all over Asia months before things are revealed officially will be kept secret until TPCi reveals things?Probably not, but the majority of figure leaks are via retailer listings, which is why some companies use codenamed nowadays. How often do you see images of figures leak out? Occasionally Transformers, some DC figures once in a while. We've never seen Pokemon figure leaks. Now, that comparison between established IPs vs top secret brand new Pokemon is probably apples to oranges, so no telling how bad leaks could be.
My point about the development times is that by the time a Pokemon's design is finalized there's still lots more game development time to go. Even if a company like Jazwares or Tomy didn't yet go to the factories they could have done all the rest of the development, before tooling and testing.
And even ignoring going deep into the gen's Pokemon, what about just the first form starters, Lechonk, Pawmi, and the rest of the Pokemon that were shown way before the game was released. No real excuses for them.
And one last thing, the Pokemon team at Jazwares is probably a handful of people, and of that handful is probably an even smaller amount of people that would work in direct development of product, so it isn't like thousands would have any clue about anything. And somehow movie licensed figures happen pretty close to release, and even when the MCU was at a fever pitch things weren't leaking out from either the licensing partners or the factories, so I don't think things out there are as 'wild west' as you're making them out to be.
