When I read "revealed" I expect pictures. Anyway, not interested. The only Botcon set I ever really wanted was last year's, and I was FAR too broke at the time.

Here's one thing, why didn't they make a Goldbug for this convention set?

Goldbug would've made a much better repaint than Cliffjumper (who was never a repaint in the first place)

I'm going to hold off jumping on and buying these now until I see some images I'm intrigue by the 2 non seeker characters to tell you the truth. I most likely will pick it up b/c Autobots far out number my Decepticons in the classic line so there goes half of my paycheck to Exclusives lol

Irony...High gas & toy prices... :tflaugh1 :tflaugh :tftongue I agree with alot of points made in this topic and yet I am dead set on going to botcon this year. I am a club member (at least till the combiner set is done) so I look at it like this: 279 for the set, 4 days @ the convention, free crap, chance of buying the secret leader :roll , at least one good meal (awards dinner) and a chance to the NEW MOVIE 4 DAYS EARLY while supporting a charity :tfhuh :thumb . I want to have an adventure this summer... I think this will be it.

True, paying for the toys also gets you all of the other crap at BotCon. It sucks if you just want the toys, but if you're going its not so bad.

The reason for the high price is because it's a LIMITED PRODUCTION RUN of these figures. They're not making millions of these, they're only making a few hundred. Yes, it sucks the price is so high, but in reality it is a necessary evil. At least FP is making money, which will ensure future conventions will go forward without problems. I still have a beef about their system but I am glad that they're doing it this way so conventions can continue.

 

I can afford this set but I do not believe it is worth it for me to get it.

 

I am unfamiliar with how many retail figures are made of say Cybertron Optimus Prime, but are they really in the millions? I find that a bit hard to believe. If someone can prove me wrong, by all means do so as it would be interesting to have indisputable information on this.

 

 

Well, considering there are more than 3000 Wal-Marts in the US, and assuming that each Wal-Mart received 10 Cyb. Primes, there are at least 30,000 figures just to supply US Wal-Marts. I would guess the production run for any mainline release figure would be at least 500 times larger than any convention exclusive. There's ovbviously economies of scale there. It may not be a big factor in a straight repaint of an existing mold, but there's probably only one straight repaint (Thundercracker). The rest have remolded parts so they'll cost more to produce. Yeah, that's not going to account for all of the price/figure differences, but it's not insignificant. Exclusives are also produced differently too; the QC is much more controlled. A normal production run would have a few figures run through the system to make sure the quality was at a certain level...that's where some of the 'test shots' come from. Exclusives don't have that initial QC check...that's why you hardly see test shots of convention exclusives popping up for sale before release.

Quoted so you don't think that everybody is ignoring your posts. :tflaugh ;)

This would be a good question to ask Hasbro at BotCon. Get an idea on how many figures they make per mold.

The reason for the high price is because it's a LIMITED PRODUCTION RUN of these figures. They're not making millions of these, they're only making a few hundred. Yes, it sucks the price is so high, but in reality it is a necessary evil. At least FP is making money, which will ensure future conventions will go forward without problems. I still have a beef about their system but I am glad that they're doing it this way so conventions can continue.

 

I can afford this set but I do not believe it is worth it for me to get it.

 

I am unfamiliar with how many retail figures are made of say Cybertron Optimus Prime, but are they really in the millions? I find that a bit hard to believe. If someone can prove me wrong, by all means do so as it would be interesting to have indisputable information on this.

 

 

Well, considering there are more than 3000 Wal-Marts in the US, and assuming that each Wal-Mart received 10 Cyb. Primes, there are at least 30,000 figures just to supply US Wal-Marts. I would guess the production run for any mainline release figure would be at least 500 times larger than any convention exclusive. There's ovbviously economies of scale there. It may not be a big factor in a straight repaint of an existing mold, but there's probably only one straight repaint (Thundercracker). The rest have remolded parts so they'll cost more to produce. Yeah, that's not going to account for all of the price/figure differences, but it's not insignificant. Exclusives are also produced differently too; the QC is much more controlled. A normal production run would have a few figures run through the system to make sure the quality was at a certain level...that's where some of the 'test shots' come from. Exclusives don't have that initial QC check...that's why you hardly see test shots of convention exclusives popping up for sale before release.

Quoted so you don't think that everybody is ignoring your posts. :tflaugh ;)

This would be a good question to ask Hasbro at BotCon. Get an idea on how many figures they make per mold.

If they decided they didn't want to share, a fair comparison might be to use the production numbers of Playmates old "Star Trek" figures, which were individually numbered (if anything the Transformers numbers are lower as the last few lines of Transformers have not been as popular as TNG was in it's heyday). For these toys, the regular action figures usually topped out somewhere in the 150-275,000 range (depending of the popularity of the character and the number of case assortments in which it appeared). The big USS Enterprise toy was about 100,000 while the other Starships seemed to top out around 75,000.

 

Based on those numbers, my guess is that the more popular deluxes sell about 100,000-150,000 copies. Prime probably sells close to 100,000 (especially since he tends to ship throughout the toyline's duration), but I'd guess all of the other Leader, Ultra and Voyager classes are more likely in the 50,000-75,000 range; and, I'd bet some of the later figures for each size class in a line (e.g. Cyberton Smokescreen, Quickmix) sell a lot less, probably as low as 10,000 for the later Voyagers/Ultras and 25,000 for the later Deluxes.

man, i was hoping this was an "aprils fools"

Hey, I guess what... I got all three seekers, and it only cost me about $60 total. I got this neat pin, too. They're called Robotmasters. You guys might want to check them out some time.