Yeah, pretty sad that Hasbro gave up / lost the JP license and now Mattel is doing better things with it.

Some days it just feels like Hasbro is giving up.

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Or have figured out that most action figure lines just don't have the profit potential any more to make it worth their while.

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Just watched another video with the truck. Pretty disappointing. It will require major modifications to be used at all. No seats, no doors. The ball beside it fits in the cab and you press a button and the cab pops open and the ball flys out of the cab. Great shell but useless to most. Does not look like it will be too hard to modify but just one more thing that has to be done. Still an awesome shell.

If someone knows how to make this grab show up as a picture that would be awesome. LOL


https://www.facebook.com/jurassicoutpos ... 0797/?t=13

Tell that to Marauder, Boss Fight, Hiya Toys, Funko, Super 7, Mattel, any number of successful action figure Kickstarter projects, Ori Toy, etc.

If you mean "most action figure lines just don't have the profit potential any more... due to the lines Hasbro chooses and (primarily) the way they handle them", then yes I agree.

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Worth their while, as in worth Hasbro's while specifically. Kickstarters and small specialty toy companies aren't in the same ballpark as Hasbro, not even in the same galaxy, really. Comparing them is ludicrous.

Mattel obviously is comparable- Mattel and Hasbro are very similar in annual sales. But in terms of profit margin, in the past few years Mattel has been around 6% while Hasbro's been up around 10%. That's a huge difference when you're talking about $5 billion in sales. It appears that Hasbro specifically targets higher-margin lines than Mattel, or perhaps they just have more efficiencies than Mattel does. So again, if an action figure line can't produce sufficient profit for Hasbro, they're going to drop it. Not because they're "giving up", but because they can invest their resources elsewhere and make more money.

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So if we are discussing pizza it wouldn't be fair to bash Domino's crappy pizza when compared to a smaller, much better pizzeria, because... Domino's is a bigger company and also does pasta and sandwiches? That's ludicrous.
Regardless of the size of the company the goals are the same.
Make product, make profit, stay in business.
And it's the product we as consumers care about, not their market numbers.

Its not like I'm comparing a bicycle to a board game. Comparable product, from companies of differing sizes, who all have their own ideas of the proper balance between quality product and profit margins.

The entire point was a direct comparison between Hasbro's Jurassic World line compared to Mattel's new Jurassic World line, and the effort that was put in to them when the license was held.
Mattel's line has even better articulation than their 4" Multiverse line had. They've improved.
Hasbro's JW line looked like they were made by Lanard, at best. And that was after doing the better dino hunters line that used super articulated Joe figures, when they didn't even have a movie in theaters to support it. A step back.

Even look at previous Star Wars offerings from the past 5-10 years, and then look at what they put out now.

Like I said, some days it just feels like Hasbro is giving up. Call it profit margins call it whatever.

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I'm not talking about the toys themselves, but the larger business decision. If you want to compare the quality of toys produced by Hasbro to those produced by anyone else, that's absolutely fair. But that wasn't the topic of discussion. (See the comments below if you feel like responding "but if they made better toys like Mattel they'd make more money.")


The point which you've missed is that how much profit the "make profit" part that is required by businesses of various sizes and market positions differ greatly. Hasbro only has limited resources, like any company. They don't have an infinite amount of money. So they have to decide on which lines to invest in. And if they're learned that lines like this don't produce enough profit to justify taking resources away from other more profitable ventures they could be investing in, then the best business decision is to end the line. Mattel is less profitable than Hasbro, so their opportunity cost of investing in a line is less than Hasbro's.


Check the financial in recent years. Hasbro is on the way up, and Mattel is on the way down. From 2014 to 2016, Hasbro's total sales increased 17% and their profit margin improved from 9.7% to 10.6%. Over the same period, Mattel has lost 9% of its sales and its profit margin has dropped from 8.2% to 5.8%. These numbers support the idea that Mattel is willing to take on lower-margin lines, because they're just not doing as well as Hasbro, who can afford to be more selective because they're better at making profit right now.

So sure, you might *feel* like they're giving up, but if you look at the facts, there's nothing to support that feeling.

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That absolutely was my point. That may have been lost.
When Hasbro had the license it felt like they phoned it in, and then let the license go. Now their top competitor takes the same property and appears to be doing it better.
In years past that would've been unthinkable.

There are numerous reasons that companies can report greater profits, from cheaper manufacturing to cutting overhead (jobs). And obviously their sales will go up with all of the new Star Wars movies coming out now. We as consumers though tend to care about, and judge the companies by, the product, not the market numbers.

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As a wise man once said, "Regardless of the size of the company the goals are the same. Make product, make profit, stay in business."

You can judge them all you like, but their increasing sales and profit margins suggests that consumers are judging them to be making very good product. Don't make the mistake of projecting your personal tastes onto the market as a whole. Again, just because you feel like they're "giving up" doesn't mean they are, and you haven't presented any particular reason to believe it.

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What the...? When was the last time Mattel had 4" figures, especially ones with more than 5poa?

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That would be a great presentation if the audience here was a group of investors. But we are toy collectors and customizers. And mostly much more specific than that, in terms of action figures in one particular scale (though not as rule, merely as the most common denominator). And while we all fall into the trap of hyperbole from time to time, it does not take much judgment to compare a toy line from one company to the same toy line from another. The semantics of whether a bad line reflects on the intent of the manufacturer really doesn't matter. It's the toys themselves that are the subject to judgment.

So you can white board all the sales info in the world, and that won't matter to a ten year old's infinite expertise in deciding one toy is cool, and another toy is crap. I for one feel like I am a large ten year old with infinite expertise in making such a judgment, and Gaigaan-Dnok has a more lengthy curriculum vitae than me (on the action figure expertise angle, if not the acting like a ten year old angle). Without caring about why a company makes a decision, or whether such decision is a good one for its shareholders, we can all examine the product and conclude that one company is trying very hard to make a good product (in this instance the preview of Mattel's new line), and that one had previously phoned it in. And such a statement can be presumed true based solely on the final product, without needing to be a fly on the wall of any board meetings so as to infer intent. The product speaks for itself to the ten year old, not the business rationalization.

Thus the sales could, but also might not reflect that quality in any way whatsoever. Whether Mattel's line loses money or not can never change the unquestionably qualified ten year old's judgment of what is or is not a good toy.

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The upcoming line really looks more complete than the few random sets that came out in 2015.
Figures, vehicles and lots of dinosaurs. If only my nephew who likes dinosaurs was also into action figures...

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DC Multiverse line