>>7328361While it's true that Toy Biz owned Marvel and anything that they made went back to their pocket, they still had to price their figures and account for the licensing cost, because they were a publically owned company.
So anything that they sold should be competitively priced.
The problem is really just that Hasbro is more cost cutting and greedier than ToyBiz/Marvel was. Yes, Hasbro is paying more for the licensing by "outbidding" Toy Biz and whomever was also seeking the Marvel license back then, but their budget as a whole went to shit when Hasbro ran out of Toy Biz's prototypes and tooling.
They switched factories too, which lowered the standards and capabilities to whatever Hasbro was making.
This is why the first few waves from Hasbro looked like mostly shit.
Once Hasbro was producing their own molds/sculpts they further reduced the line, so suddenly the standards went down even further. Lots of cost cutting efforts were made to the ML line and then they basically just quit for a smaller scale, in order to sell more product and further reducing costs (never ending redecos and retools), while also maintaining a price that was similar to Toy Biz's MLs.
By the end of the line, the 1:18 figures were $10 compared to Toy Biz's MLs which were ~$13 in just two years.
Anyway, the biggest hit to the prices and costs was China's slave revolts. Costs just increased too much, which is one of the big reason why Marvel sold the license in the first place. The future was too uncertain and riskier for goods being manufactured in China, and they were right.
