Skritz wrote:Emerje wrote:william-james88 wrote:Yeah, it was 10 years ago. And we have it better than most. I remember Marvel legends being 10$ and now its nuts, especially for what you get. I remember their build a figure being Galactus and a Sentinel, not another 6 inch figure.
That's about as good an example as any of the difference between licensing your characters and making your own. Marvel Legends' higher prices and smaller BAFs are a direct result of the higher license fees that came with their exploding popularity. Meanwhile Transformers don't have a licensing fee (outside of the occasional car) so what they want to do is only limited by how much they want to charge us.
Emerje
Aren't Transformers costlier to design/build/assemble due to all the smaller pieces that move to allow for transformations, compared to a simpler action figure with only a few points of articulation?
Exactly. They have all that going against them and they're still far cheaper than the licensed products that all share the same relative articulation and in many cases even the same parts.
william-james88 wrote:Also, the poil prices people are quoting have nothing to do with the oil used to make these toys. Hasbro has told us time and time again that its the resin cost that matters, not oil costs. The oil prices are the ones used for fuel and for your car to drive. Resin however is a synthetic using a different type of oil (not fuel) and its the labour costs that go into making this resin which is the biggest factor. So not necessarily the fluctuation in the organic source.
The graph I gave was for crude oil, the raw stuff straight from the ground, not refined oil used for fuel. This is what's used to make plastic. The resin they're talking about is the plastic itself in its final form (when plastic is sorted for recycling the number inside the triangle is the "resin identification code"), but you can't get to that point without starting from crude oil so of course it's going to have a big impact on the production costs.
A couple quotes from Wikipedia:
Plastics are typically organic polymers of high molecular mass, but they often contain other substances. They are usually synthetic, most commonly derived from petrochemicals, but many are made from renewable materials such as polylactic acid from corn or cellulosics from cotton linters.
FYI: Polylactic acid (PLA) is a biodegradable plastic used most commonly in food packaging and medical procedures, and 3D printers, not something like toys you'd want to last a long time.
The two most common petrochemical classes are olefins (including ethylene and propylene) and aromatics (including benzene, toluene and xylene isomers). [...] Olefins are the basis for polymers and oligomers used in plastics, resins, fibers, elastomers, lubricants, and gels.[...] Olefins includes ethylene, propylene, and butadiene. Ethylene and propylene are important sources of industrial chemicals and plastics products. Butadiene is used in making synthetic rubber.
Another quote from
this article regarding the effect of crude prices on products made from it:
When the cost of oil goes up, production costs are increased and profits reduced for industries that depend on oil. Producer costs — not consumer gasoline costs — are the reason high oil prices threaten to shrink industrial production of goods directly affected and also of energy-intensive products such as aluminum and paper.
So yeah, I don't know what Hasbro is talking about if they think crude oil prices don't effect the cost of the plastic they make their figures out of. Maybe the question was outside the scope of the person answering it or they're simply in denial or knowingly being misleading because they weren't exactly being upfront about the figures shrinking in 2012?
And I don't deny that there are labor and production costs in making the plastic, but those are stable expenses, those change gradually. You can't get that far without your biggest raw material which fluctuates all the time.
Emerje
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. And a goatee. Sure. Totally unrelated to that SG Rodimus. 
