Sabrblade wrote:megatronus wrote:I'm surprised at all the support for this statement. Sure, naysayers of the sets' prices could be more graceful in their disappointment, but these are NOT Botcon and NOT SDCC exclusives. These are RETAIL products found at DISCOUNT retailers like Kmart.
What's so hard to understand about that?
Note the strategic use of caps.
They are not "mass" retail items, though. They are limited edition retail exclusives being sold by only one or two stores (the fact that one of them turned out to be Kmart of all things is beyond belief), and have been giving all the same bells and whistles that BotCon and SDCC exclusives get and which standard mass retail figures do not get. That extra pizzazz doesn't come cheap.
Botcon and SDCC figures are not produced en masse. Presumably, these are. It's like how we see a Takara MP reissue just when a Hasbro MP releases. The deco might differ and add some additional cost, but it's not like the actual production of the mold was limited for the purpose of these sets. That by and large has a bigger effect on cost than a premium deco does.
Please, please get it into your head that this is NOT Botcon, which is being run by TFCC and necessitates higher price points by sheer nature of exclusivity and cost. And this isn't SDCC 2014, where more exclusive 4-packs with more expensive decos, add-ins, and packaging cost not much more than some of these sets will cost at retail.
You can bring up Botcon or SDCC all you want, but it's apples and oranges. Just because these molds have premium decos does not mean they should cost as much as convention exclusives. I don't mind ambivalence to high prices, but your blind defense of them, and odd suppression of those who grimace at the price tag, doesn't just seem elitist, but is, in the truest sense of the word, elitist. And when it comes to retail product, mass or not, that's not cool in my book.